


Valentine & Vimes: Un/Affected

by Aleaiactaest, Slyjinks



Series: Valentine & Vimes [9]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Fallout 4
Genre: Adoption (referenced), Body Horror, Dismemberment, Drug Use, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Sexual Content in separate chapters, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Magic weirdness, Multi, Sandwich-shaming, Societal Homophobia, Unethical Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 79,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27916342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aleaiactaest/pseuds/Aleaiactaest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/pseuds/Slyjinks
Summary: Navigating what synths are and are not affected by in Ankh-Morpork can be a tricky matter at best. Magic in the Disc seems to share some superficial similarities with radiation. According to their narrative, synths are immune to radiation, and magic often bends to narrative… but nothing’s guaranteed.As it turns out, sometimes a person can be simultaneously affected and not-affected by a thing, as Nick Valentine finds out when he risks entering an intense patch in a magical storm in order to save a child, and ends up quite literally beside himself as a result.(There are a few sexually explicit sections, but these have been placed in their own chapters and will be warned for.)
Relationships: Nick Valentine/Samuel Vimes, Sybil Ramkin/Samuel Vimes
Series: Valentine & Vimes [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076
Comments: 59
Kudos: 9





	1. Not Affected and Affected * Beside Himself * Hungry Like The *  Foot of the Bed

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a soundtrack/Youtube playlist available: [V&V: Un/Affected](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story so far: Less than a year ago, a magic accident threw Sam Vimes into the role of the Sole Survivor in a simulation/game running on Hex. He believed what he experienced to be real, and his realness and belief brought a measure of realness to those characters he interacted with most. In the year-plus of in-game time, believing himself to be a widow, he fell in love with Nick Valentine. When he was brought home, the game characters who had been made real were brought with him. Eventually Sam, Nick (who had joined the Watch), and Sybil worked things out between them. In the end, the Vimes family adopted the synth duplicate of Young Sam (now renamed Shaun) and Sam Vimes took a husband in addition to his wife. Meanwhile, DiMA stuck around Unseen University to better understand the nature of this new reality, and eventually became an official student; Piper and Nat joined the Ankh-Morpork Times staff; Deacon went to work for the Golem Trust; Codsworth went to work for the Vimes family; Strong joined the Watch; Preston became a guard for the Grand Trunk clacks network; Old Longfellow ran off to Fourecks to run banana wine carts across their wilds; and who even knows what Hancock is up to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Paleblood Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eSrmSsz7mQ&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=1) by Miracle Of Sound and [Awakening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGoIpdZQkI0&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=2%22) by The Damning Well.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Not Affected and Affected * Beside Himself * Hungry Like The * Foot of the Bed_

Valentine found himself quite liking the Ankh-Morpork rain, when it wasn’t laden with acid or frogs. It didn’t usually bode rad storms and devastation. This time, however, it had boded something arguably worse: magic, dark and stormy.

He was off duty, but he’d come running, nonetheless, when he’d heard what turned out to be Corporal Clair Brown’s whistle, not far from the Unreal Estates. There was a boy, trapped in what looked like silvery blue fire that radiated around him for several yards. Above him, a red moon hung full. Something under the boy’s skin twisted and writhed, and he screamed in terror.

Brown looked at Nick and said, “We need a wizard.”

Something dripped from the boy’s eyes, a colour that wasn’t a colour at all.

“I don’t think we have time to wait for a wizard,” said Nick. A wizard was never late, they said, especially when it came to when the buffet opened, but wizards weren’t exactly on time, either.

Radiation didn't affect Nick Valentine like it did a human; his electronics were all nuclear-hardened. It was possible magic radiation wouldn't affect him, either. It was equally possible that it would.

So Valentine wandered into the high magic field and out of it without any trouble, clutching the terrified, sobbing boy, whose skin stopped crawling the moment that Valentine stepped out of the strange silvery-blue fire. The clouds closed over the moon.

And then Valentine wandered out of it, again, as a human, or maybe a Gen 3 synth, he thought. It was rather hard to tell the difference. Both Nick Valentines were wrong on both accounts, though; the second Nick Valentine, who was beside himself, was neither human nor a Gen 3 synth, and maybe the amber eyes, inhuman, should have been a tip off.

* * *

The wizard who did finally amble into the area, unhurried, was Ponder, who called ‘dibsies’ on studying whatever terribly interesting thing it was that had split Nick into two people. Shortly after, Nick and Nick stood in two neat chalk ritual circles back in one of Unseen University’s unused classrooms, while Brown worked on writing down her report after the boy’s parents had tearfully reclaimed their son. 

Ponder continued with the chalk on a series of blackboards and thoughtfully double-checked his calculations before concluding, “You are, Mr. Valentine and Mr. Valentine, both as you are,” and he looked at the battered old synth detective, “and as you would have been if you had been… native to this plane, in a sense.”

“Oh… kay,” said Valentine and Valentine.

“Now, your morphic field is particularly unstable. I don’t think you’re going to be able to stay this way long, perhaps a few months at most,” warned Ponder.

“So put me back together?” said Valentine hopefully.

Ponder looked at his calculations again wistfully. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to even attempt that for a few months, as the case may be. This is lunar magic at work, you see.” He pointed.

Valentine did not see, but he nodded politely as if he did. He had a shift coming up and wouldn’t even have time to make it home before it started, he certainly wouldn’t have time for another explanation from Ponder Stibbons.

* * *

A. E. Pessimal informed Valentine that, in cases of Watchmen being split into two people, no, they did not receive double pay. Valentine called bullcrap on that, and then went back through Watch records. He found that it was in fact so. The difference, he argued, which didn’t make any difference to A. E. Pessimal, was that Constable Wong Ryan had actively wanted to be split into two people because he was chronically lazy and in danger of being let go from the Watch because he was always late to duty. As two people, Ryan was now twice as late, but at least he got his work done.

* * *

As Vimes walked through the Watch House and up to his office, he passed by Valentine in the hallway. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Valentine looked different, and he granted himself just a pause to look at Valentine.

Valentine was flesh and blood, very much so, with a jawline made to be languidly stroked and muscles that filled out his uniform just so and a head of grey-brown hair crying out to have fingers tangled in it and smooth brown skin that called to be kissed. His eyes caught Vimes’s, and Vimes was entranced for a moment by their rather startling shade of amber.

The hair on the back of Vimes’s neck prickled, something like a memory or a warning or both. He opened his mouth to ask Nick what had happened, but Carrot called from down the hallway, “Mr. Vimes! We’ve had a break in the case about the rash of false census forms.”

“Uhm. Ni - Constable Valentine’s human?” Vimes said faintly, suddenly concerned about what might have happened to his husband.

“Magical accident earlier, sir,” said Carrot, “but if you’ll look at this report…”

* * *

In the foyer of his cozy home, Vimes looked at Valentine beside himself, finally having time to get the full explanation. He’d been on pins and needles all day, worrying himself sick with _might-be_. Valentine, both of him, shrugged, and the synth said, “Eh. I rushed into some weird magic thing. There was a kid in trouble. Got him out.”

“And I walked out, too,” said the flesh and blood Valentine. “Mr. Stibbons says that this is me, as I would be, if I was ‘native’ to the Disc.”

Vimes looked at him again. Valentine made a handsome human, looking like a grabbag of different countries, with a generous chunk of Howandaland to his ancestry, but also some Pseudopolitan, Brindisian, Genuan, and definitely… far Uberwald? Vimes hesitantly touched that Valentine’s shoulder, and he felt solid to Vimes’s touch. “And what else did Mr. Stibbons have to say for himself?”

“I’m okay for now, but he’s going to have to put me back together eventually, but he can’t do it for a few months. For now, you’re going to have to put up with two of me,” said the flesh and blood Valentine. 

“Oh, I will, won’t I?” said Vimes, a touch manic, despite himself. Weird magic buggery had split Valentine into two people, and Vimes knew he ought to be concerned, and he _was_ concerned, dammit, but he couldn’t be blamed for looking on the bright side, could he?

Bright like that smile and those amber eyes.

* * *

A place setting was added to the table for the second Nick, and he was furnished with a hearty serving of kale salad as Sybil watched him expectantly, gushing, “You must have looked quite dashing, saving that child,” which she directed at the synth Valentine.

The flesh and blood Valentine, though, sniffed thoughtfully. The world was a riot of senses that weren’t quite familiar. Oh, as a synth, he’d always been able to see, but his optics registered wavelengths, and his mind processed those numbers into colours. As a human, he had, what, rods and three types of cones? And then a brain that did a bunch of bullcrap extrapolations to come up with a picture. It was jarring.

Then there was smell. Valentine had always been able to smell, though he often regretted it, what with living in Diamond City and then Ankh-Morpork, but now he felt like he had been nose-blind his entire life. Vimes had the iron scent of blood that wasn’t his own and old armour, leather, and the soft floral notes of the bubble bath that he favoured. Valentine wanted to bury his face against Vimes’s chest and breathe him in. Sybil had Vimes tonight, though.

The kale salad was sharp and bitter, like green knives against his tongue. The taste of it was wholly different then he remembered his sense of taste functioning. The sherry was so sweet it made his teeth ache, with notes of wood. He picked it up and downed it all and found himself with a sudden headache. He looked around, to see if someone had struck him, and then it dawned on him: this body, made by a magical fluke, had a liver that had never touched alcohol before. Valentine was going to have to be careful.

“Look, Sam, Nick’s wolfed his salad down,” Sybil said, as if this scored her some points in the complex marital game between her and Vimes.

“Because he doesn’t know any better,” Vimes hissed.

“But what kind of magic split you, Dad?” asked young Sam.

“I dunno,” said the synth Valentine, who didn’t have his mouth full. He shrugged. “It’s magic.”

“I bet it was transmutation,” young Sam declared haughtily.

“It was rubbish,” Vimes said firmly, “but Nick is safe. Ish. And that’s the important thing.”

* * *

Valentine made it through work. He made it through going home and dinner and spending time with family. He guiltily snuck into the kitchen and had some of the Fancy Lads snack cakes that Sybil’s chef made as a special treat for Shaun, because those things really were addictively good. Then he walked into his dressing room like a sleepwalker and tactically, with grace, completely broke down. Valentine crumpled over the sink, sobbing, drawing in breath in ragged gasps.

Everything was different. Everything was wrong. Dark brown, curly hair protruded from his skin. Already he had more stubble on his face than he knew what to do with it, and he was going to have to bite the bullet and shave tomorrow. His skin was too sensitive, too itchy. Clothing felt strange as it draped over his body. The taste of his own saliva in his mouth was like the sensation after a particularly intense make out session with Sam, only it went on and on and on and it didn’t mean anything! Food, any food, was like a nuclear explosion on his tongue. He had a stomach; it gurgled like some alien beast inside him, just waiting to burst free. At some point, he was going to have to use a lavatory; he couldn’t keep holding it in, and Valentine knew he was going to end up weeping on the floor from the strangeness of it all when it came to that. Muscles contracted and relaxed instead of servos moving step by step. Lungs drew breath instead of fans circulating cooling air. A heart beat blood, red and sticky.

Valentine wanted to take a knife to his face and peel back the skin, fat, and flesh and see steel underneath, and he knew that no matter how much his hand hovered over the shaving razor that Vimes had supplied for him, that he must not do that. 

He was human. He looked, he thought, like a mix of black, Italian, and Irish, but that wasn’t the problem, that made sense for Chicago. The problem was that he looked like the original Nick Valentine, or like what he thought the original Nick Valentine looked like, if the original Nick Valentine would have lived to his fifties. It was stupid. He knew there was no original Nick Valentine. And yet.

And yet he was still his ghost, and he was still being haunted.

Why couldn’t Nick Valentine ever have anything for himself, that was just his and his alone? He was a detective in a city where the local police force’s reform had started over a decade ago and continued even now. It wasn’t a city that needed a private eye to take the hopeless cases. The police here actually _did_ that. He had a husband who loved his wife, revered her as he should, and that meant that Valentine could only ever be number two in his heart, no matter how Valentine had held Vimes in the wasteland when the nightmares came. Two brilliant little boys looked at him as a parent… an extra parent, who was nice to have and a little puzzling to explain to other children at school, but just that. Extra. Even his whole reality had been a fake, and he’d had to let it go, in the end.

Now Nick Valentine couldn’t even have his own damn face. He snarled into the mirror, looking at the harvest moon golden eyes, and he drew his hand back into a fist.

He stopped, startled, and he yelped. Valentine looked at his hand. Somehow, he’d drawn blood, just clenching his hand into a fist. How were his nails that sharp? 

The blood was so red. _Synthetic man. All the parts, minus a few red blood cells._ Well, now he had those, too. Valentine impulsively licked the little cuts in hand, and the blood was salty and metallic. Intoxicating. Despite just having had dinner, he felt so very hungry as the scent of it filled his nose.

Valentine looked at his hand again. He’d just barely scratched it. 

* * *

Valentine had wondered if he was going to have problems with two of himself in his bedroom. He didn’t need sleep, but he did tend to read in his bed. The synthetic man had said aloud, “Y’know, I don’t need much time to defragment, maybe we could just trade off.”

But the other man just curled up at his feet at the foot of the bed, and it seemed to make sense to both of them, so they let it slide without further question.

* * *

“You need a shave,” Vimes told Valentine, looking at him over breakfast. Carrot could be particular about that sort of thing.

“Does Mister Nick require assistance?” Codsworth inquired solicitously.

“A man ought to know how to shave himself,” Vimes said firmly.

The human Valentine ran his fingers along his jawline, and Vimes longed to touch him. Dammit, just when he’d started to get settled in with Valentine, cosy and familiar, this went and happened, and everything was new and fresh and strange. Valentine said, “I s’pose so, but y’know, I don’t know how, all the same.”

“I’ll show you,” said Vimes. He’d have to show Shaun how to shave in a few years. Better to learn how to teach it now, rather than later.

Valentine’s dressing room was his own space, and Vimes generally left him to it, but trying to show another man how to shave was a tricky business. Valentine was pressed up against his sink, staring at the mirror. Vimes stood behind him and rocked up on his toes, though there was still that difference in their heights, so he nudged Valentine, who widened his stance, lowering him down.

Vimes reached around Valentine and put his hand over Valentine’s own, and it was so strange to feel Valentine’s hand as flesh and blood, rather than slender metal. He showed him how to wet his face, take soap and make lather, and check the cutthroat razor’s edge.

“Orient it towards the Hub. It’ll stay sharp, that way,” said Vimes.

Sybil had offered Valentine one of those new-fangled technomantic shavers, one that she’d bought for Vimes a few years ago, because she had that strange passion for gadgetry, but Vimes would be damned if he’d allow a little demon with sharp objects near his husband’s neck.

_But you’re here._

Vimes _was_ here, pressed up against Valentine’s back, Valentine bent slightly over the sink, his hand over Valentine’s, guiding Valentine to light, gentle strokes that let the razor do all the work. Valentine pressed back against him and said, “I think I got it, doll.”

Vimes let go of Valentine and pulled back, watching him in the mirror. Valentine was almost done when he slipped with the steel razor and drew blood, swearing, “Shit!”

He splashed water on his face, frowning. He rubbed his fingers over his freshly shaven skin, looking at the cut, and Vimes peered at it, as well. Then Valentine said, “Hnn. Not as bad as I thought it was.”

There was barely a shallow nick.

* * *

At work that day, Captain Carrot sent the human Nick Valentine down to Cable Street, where he nodded to the urchins in the street as he passed. Most of them on this street reported to the Watch as well as to Queen Molly, though they were all quick to clarify that it was not work, as such.

Cable Street was where the Particulars, the plains clothes coppers, were based out of. They kept apart from the rest of the Watch, by the nature of their tasks, but Valentine could recognize a few of them. There was an angry Tezuman woman he’d seen at a few society balls whom he was almost entirely certain was a Particular. He’d walked in on her going through their host’s trash, and she’d jumped out the window when he’d caught her. Valentine had commented about her to Vimes.

Vimes had sighed, “I’d tell you not to worry about her, but given that I know you and that you’d just take that as an excuse to investigate further, yes, she’s on my payroll. I’ve talked to her about the jumping out the windows business…”

But she wasn’t there today. In the foyer, there was a dapper gent with a fabulous mustache who appeared to be a barber-surgeon. He was arguing with another man, and he insisted, “‘Mentats goggles’ are not a thing.”

The small but thriving Mentats trade on the streets of Ankh-Morpork was a consequence, indirectly, of Valentine’s existence. They, like most other drugs, were legal in Ankh-Morpork. Psycho was the only Commonwealth incursion pharmaceutical that the Patrician had outlawed. 

“‘Mentats goggles’ must be a thing!” the other man argued. “I keep fancying people I would never consider!”

Of course some of the Particulars would start hitting the Mentats, which generally boosted intelligence and perception. DiMA said that Mentats were already popular with wizarding students. Valentine bet the Assassins were hitting them, too. Valentine sometimes worked with gangs of street kids due to Captain Carrot’s role in the local youth group organizations, but they tended to prefer Buffout.

“Oh, like who?” the possible barber-surgeon demanded of the other man.

A man that Valentine recognized flagged him down and greeted, “Constable Valentine! If you’d step into my office?”

Valentine did. The door had a frosted window with no name plate. The office had wooden horizontal blinds. Valentine felt a pang of longing. All this office needed was a too-clever-by-half secretary, its own Ellie Perkins. But there was a more pressing matter. “You’re André, one of the pianists at the Opera House.” 

“And you, Constable Valentine, are a man who actually reads the Playbill,” the other man replied carefully. He reached into an internal pocket and carefully pulled out a badge and handed it to Valentine.

Valentine read it. Badges and badge numbers were generally a chaotic riot in Ankh-Morpork. At least three different Badge styles were still in use, and Vimes’s, for example, was a genuine antique, dating back to the time of Veltrick I. This badge that ‘André’ had was of the modern style, with a low badge number, with the implication that André had been hired in the early years of Vimes’s Watch reform, maybe even hired by Vimes himself. Valentine handed the badge back.

“Other Watchmen have said that you’re clever. Clever enough for the work. The trouble’s always been that you’re distinctive in your looks, Constable Valentine. But now you aren’t, no offense,” said André, “and there’s a case that needs seeing to.”

“Don’t know that plainclothes is the beat for me,” said Valentine. “Being honest about what I am has always served me best.” 

André put his hands up. “Hear me out. If you don’t think you can handle the mission, I can always take a leave of absence from the Opera House.” Everywhere, the Watch was short-staffed, even the Particulars, it seemed. “You know Constable Bluejohn, lives in Sunink?”

“The new housing estates in widdershins New Ankh? Yeah,” said Valentine.

“Lots of middle class trolls in that area. Trolls with disposable cash. Trolls who can afford to give the little chips off the block a spending allowance. Bluejohn’s been noticing the kids getting into Crystal Slam in Sunink,” said André.

“They won’t talk to Bluejohn?” said Valentine, drumming his fingers on the edge of André’s desk.

“All the troll parents swear up and down to Bluejohn that they don’t know how their little darlings got into that stuff, and not to put too fine a point on it, the kids aren’t talking. We wanted to get an operative into the Sunink Interspecies Academy as a teacher to get a better idea of what was going on.”

“I’m not a teacher,” Valentine said.

“You can read, write, and figure, which is more than most can, and Mr. Vimes says that you’re great with his boys,” said André.

 _Our boys_ , thought Valentine, but in a sense, they weren’t. But he caught that ‘Mr. Vimes’. What was André’s history? “So what, try to figure out where the Crystal Slam’s coming from?”

“Yes. And be careful about it, because Bluejohn’s concerned that some of the kids have taken the laws the wrong way. It’s a hanging crime for selling Crystal Slam, you know, and Bluejohn thinks, if one kid gave some to another in exchange for a really nice dolomite at lunch, maybe they’re worried that counts as selling,” said André, shrugging.

“Does it count as selling?” asked Valentine.

André admitted hesitantly, “Depends on the lawyers.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe the kids aren’t wrong to want to avoid talking to the flatfoots,” said Valentine. 

“Maybe. But it’s been three troll kids dead this school year. Will you take the case?” asked André.

 _I am an easy mark,_ thought Valentine. _A regular bleeding heart._ “Sure.”

André slid Valentine a manilla folder filled with case information and a new identity. “You’re a substitute schoolteacher from a part of the Disc known as the Great Outdoors, you’ll find your Teachers’ Guild Badge in the folder…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S** : So fun fact! Originally, “Going Nuclear”, “Welcome Home”, “Uranium Fever”, and this fic were all part of the same fic!
> 
> We eventually decided that that was insane and broke them up.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	2. Third Form * Basic Glitch * Shadow of the Lemma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Moon Over Bourbon Street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A_3M6pkMls&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=3) by Sting.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Third Form * Basic Glitch * Shadow of the Lemma_

Valentine read the packet. There were four main types of schools in Ankh-Morpork: Guild schools, which were usually open to the children of members of those Guilds and foundlings and orphans taken in by the Guilds; charity schools, such as the Spiteful Sisterhood of Seven-Handed Sek, where Vimes paid for Nat Wright's tuition; dame schools, which were mostly run in the homes of dames and were often little better than day care; and so-called independent schools or public schools, which were actually just paid private schools, but were called public schools because anyone, irrespective of Guild or religious affiliation could attend... if they had the money.

Shaun and young Sam attended a so-called 'public' school, the Frout Academy For Enquiring Young Minds, which was very expensive indeed, and neither Sam nor Sybil were particularly happy with it. Miss Susan appeared to be the only teacher in the entire joint who understood that children did well with some structure, and next year, young Sam wasn't going to be in her class anymore. He'd have another loosy-goosy anti-disciplinarian like Shaun had.

Valentine had heard some of the arguments between Sam and Sybil on the subject, though he knew there must have been more, long before Valentine or Shaun existed. The Assassins' Guild supposedly had the best school in the city, but there was no way Sam was sending any sons of his there. Some of the traditional schools of the gentry, such as Hugglestones, were also out, because they tended to have their students out on the sporting killing fields of honour which were, in fact, actual killing fields. Sybil would occasionally bring up the suggestion of homeschooling with tutors, but Vimes would argue that was a fine way to raise out-of-touch toffs who didn't know how to interact with anyone.

Valentine stayed out of those arguments. He just helped the boys with their homework and read ahead in their books when they were sleeping. Valentine didn't know Ankh-Morpork history any more than they did, but with two shining faces looking up to him, he'd fake it.

Primary school ran from age 5 to 11, and it was made up of Years 1 through 6, but it was also made up of Infants year 1 to 2, first year junior, second year junior, third year junior, and fourth year junior, and also key Stages 1 to 2.

Secondary school covered ages 11 to 16 and years 7 to 11 and First form, second form, third form, fourth form, and fifth form, but also Key Stages 3 and 4.

Beyond that, a few schools offered sixth form, which covered years 16-18 as lower sixth and upper sixth, but there weren't many.

Many children never had any schooling at all. Many only did one year. Even those who had some schooling often cut it short early to join a Guild or take a job.

Even Sam and Sybil didn't really think Shaun or young Sam would be in school past age 16, unless one of them decided to go to university, but even that was the source of arguments between Sam and Sybil, more arguments that Valentine stayed out of.

On Sybil's side of the family, there had been men who could have been wizards. Valentine hadn't caught what, exactly, had stopped them. Young Sam had the signs of a boy who could be a wizard, if he wanted to. Willikins, who was around young Sam more than Vimes, had noticed things. In overheard arguments, Valentine gathered that Sam didn't want his son to go meddling with the fabric of reality.

Valentine couldn’t help but think about his brother.

Valentine’s assigned cover name was Mr. Ed Zwicky, and Valentine wondered if André was playing a joke on him. The Great Outdoors was in the Widdershins Lands, as they were called by people who didn’t actually live there, and it was bordered by Nothingfjord, the Vortex Plains, Uberwald, Borogravia, Genua, and Kythia. It was not actually a nation. It was a collection of independent settlements founded by refugees from other places. Valentine had to wonder - had the place really been both habitable and empty? He’d heard that story told before, in another world. Because if the place really had fur trapping, herring fishing, apples to harvest for brandy, and mines for iron and silver, he rather thought that there would already be people living there, be said people humans, dwarfs, or whatever.

But the briefing dossier on his identity didn’t have any mention of pre-existing natives of the Great Outdoors, from before the settlers had arrived. Valentine knew that, long ago, the Mage Wars had wracked the Disc. Maybe the Great Outdoors had only recently become habitable, the wild magic fields subsiding? He didn’t know.

The Great Outdoors would explain Valentine’s perpetually-foreign accent, anyway, and why he looked to be a little bit from everywhere.

As far as the substitute teacher position at the Sunink Interspecies Academy went, Valentine had the job before he walked in. The SIA had been expecting a substitute sent from the Teachers’ Guild; they’d been expecting a substitute for weeks. Ankh-Morpork was suffering from a long and worsening shortage of teachers. The city was short 1,850 maths teachers, almost 1,200 logic teachers, and 1,000 flower-arranging instructors.1

Teachers didn’t last. Most left the profession in five years. They cited long working hours, high stress levels, and concerns about the effect on their mental wellbeing. However, as Headmaster McKinley Mensick explained, the previous maths teacher, one Mr. Jeremiah Zuleger, left because he’d passed away.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Valentine, as Mensick gently buried him under all the ungraded papers that Zuleger had left behind.

“Yes. He was eaten by a shadowing lemma,” Mensick sighed.

Valentine blinked and tried not to move too much, lest he be papercut to death. “He what?”

“I suppose you don’t get shadowing lemmas in the Great Outdoors. Two-dimensional entities that eat mathematicians. Quite common near and in the Unreal Estate. I’d avoid the whole area, if I were you,” sniffed Mensick.

“Oh… kay,” said Valentine.

“The day’s half over, so you’ll just do the afternoon today, but we’ll expect you sharp tomorrow morning. We start at 8:50 AM,2 but you’ll have to be here at 7:50 AM to prepare, of course,” said Mensick.

Which meant leaving home no later than 7:20, which wasn’t bad, all things considered.

“One other thing. This was Mr. Zuleger’s cane,” said Mensick, sliding it towards Valentine.

Valentine looked at the cane, not parsing what was meant.

“For caning. We do enforce discipline here,” said Mensick.

“Oh,” said Valentine weakly, unwilling to touch the cane, “Uhm. Can’t I just assign them more maths homework?”

Mensick gave him a severe look. “I see they breed cruel men in the Great Outdoors, Mr. Zwicky.”

1 Numbers roughly inspired by [Roundworld shortages.](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/feb/04/30000-teacher-shortfall--secondary-schools-further-education)

2 [Of course, every school in Ankh-Morpork is a little different](https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=978227) (and showing at a specific time “sharp” would likely rely on a consensus of the bells…).

* * *

SIA covered first form, second form, third form, fourth form, and fifth form and was thus considered secondary school, for human ages 11 to 16, with what form nonhuman students were placed into largely being left to the discretion of their parents to decide. Goblins tended to live shorter lifespans than humans, but no one was sure how much of that was inherent to the race and how much of it was historical baggage from generations of mistreatment. Gnomes tended to live a little longer than humans, if they were the bookish, shoemaking type, as opposed to the type that bought riding birds from the Nac Mac Feegle and picked fights with vampire bats. Dwarfs weren’t considered adults until they were 50, but that meant that dwarfs anywhere from age 26 to 34 might be considered equivalent to a human 11 year old. Trolls grew up even more slowly than dwarfs did. 

Humans, one goblin, a few gnomes, dwarfs, and trolls were the students at SIA. Many nonhuman species, such as gnolls and gargoyles, for example, didn’t send their children to school. Vampires generally felt that they could do better than a shabby middle class affair for social climbers. Wherever werewolves went for schooling, they kept quiet, generally presenting themselves as human.3 Golems didn’t have children; legally, they were not allowed to make more of themselves, and even if they did, what resulted would not be considered children. Zombie children were a rather sad occurence and thankfully rare.

Now Valentine was thrown in front of the third form, a class of twenty that contained perhaps eight humans, six dwarfs, three trolls, two gnomes, and one goblin. There had been four trolls in this class, according to Valentine’s notes, but one had passed away as a result of a Crystal Slam overdose. The other deceased troll children had been in other classes, first form and fifth form. He greeted, “Hello, class. I’m Mr. Zwicky. I understand some of you might have been close with Mr. Zuleger -”

A human boy opined loudly, “Sod that guy!”

Valentine had looked over the seating chart, and he said flatly, “Have some respect for the dead, Wilburn Dendy.”

“Why? My Da says that zombies just take our jobs and draw a pension all at the same time, and it ain’t right,” argued Wilburn.

“The differently alive form an important part of our society -” Valentine started.

“Ey, you’re a foreigner,” said another student.

“C’mon, these maths are rubbish. This algebra’s Klatchian, innit? When am I gonna need to solve for X?” demanded a third.

The second argued, “Oh no, don’t you get on about that, Myron. I tell you, I was in Sator Square when this big X swaggered right up an’ demanded I solve for it.”

“You’re making that up,” the third one pouted

“The gods’ own truth,” said the second, smugly.

“...free-roving semi-hostile equations aside, algebra is a good foundation for learning statistics, and you need statistics to make educated bets on horse races,” said Valentine, wearily, trying to engage his audience.

“Not if dem horse is drugged,” said Moonstone, a troll girl. “Not dat I know nuffin ‘bout dat.”

3 Aside from wolf-form yennorks, who generally went to obedience school.

* * *

What quickly became apparent, when Valentine asked some students to come to the board and work through problems that, per Zuleger’s notes, they should have had done last month, before he died, was that they had not done these problems. Now, this was third form. These children were supposed to be 13-14 or the equivalent for their species. What also quickly became apparent was that Zuleger either hadn’t realized or hadn’t cared that most trolls were brought up counting in base four.

Valentine knew that because he worked with troll officers all the time. A few of them were more inclined to counting in base two, but those officers were generally considered dim even by other trolls. Here these kids were, possibly having been in schooling since whatever the equivalent of age 5 was for them, and no one had sat down and done a lesson about different numerical bases so that everyone could be on the same page with regards to counting. It would have made Valentine’s coolant boil, if he’d still had coolant.

That, and Morporkian wasn’t the first language for a good chunk of the class, and no one seemed to want to even acknowledge that fact.

So there he was, throwing out Zuleger’s scrawled lesson plans for the week and trying to come up with an explanation of mathematical bases, and he thought that some of them were starting to get it - Moonstone actually stopped carving runes in her arm to pay attention - when one of the dwarf boys sighed, tossed his beard theatrically over his shoulder, and demanded, “Why are you giving the trolls so much attention?”

“I’m teaching numerical bases. Why do you think it doesn’t apply to you?” Valentine asked.

The goblin threw his arm up, waving frantically. He was, according to Nick’s notes, the son of the famous and now quite wealthy inventor, Of The Wheel The Spoke. He was called Around the Gear the Chain.

Valentine sighed, “Yes, Around the Gear the Chain?”

“Oh oh, can we do base six-teen next, Mis-ter Zwi-icky?” asked Around the Gear the Chain, fairly standing on his chair.

In fact, the humans had all the front seats in the classroom in the first two rows, then the dwarfs in the third row, then the trolls, gnomes, and one goblin in the last row, which given the respective heights of the various species, seemed suboptimal. Valentine didn’t see how the two gnome children could see _anything_. As soon as he could, he was re-arranging the seating chart.

“Base sixteen,” _like the clacks,_ and Valentine knew that most goblins loved the clacks, “sure.”

* * *

The school day was out at 3:30 PM, but for the teachers, it never ended. They mulled about in the staff room, staring blearily into their cups of tea and coffee. The Logics teacher, Mr. Peyton Slicker, withdrew a small dark flask from his sleeve and dumped a glug into his mug before downing the whole thing.

“Ah. The new maths teacher. Mr. Zablocki?” asked Ms. Erin Knowell, the History teacher.

“Zwicky,” Valentine corrected gently, smiling at her.

“Ah. Doesn’t matter. You won’t last. They never do, these days,” said Knowell, a thousand-yard stare in her eyes.

“Maths. Hmm,” sniffed Ms. Laverne Gramlich, the Language teacher, Language meaning ‘Morporkian’, meaning ‘Morporkian Classics’, meaning ‘written by dead rich noble Morpokian men’. Sybil liked reading. Valentine liked reading. They often read the same books and then discussed them. She was a well-bred lady. Valentine had quickly learned what the ‘Classics’ were.

It wasn’t even that the Classics were bad. A lot of them had been quite popular in their time, and that meant something. It was just that there were troll history chants, for example, that were just as good, and they didn’t feature anywhere in the classroom. The dwarf playwright Hwel, at his best, had a blistering wit and had produced prose surely worthy of analysis. Sybil had been lucky that she’d taken Dwarfish as a foreign language and thus been exposed to sagas such as _Bloodaxe and Ironhammer_. SIA didn’t teach foreign languages; it felt that its students already had more than enough foreign languages on their own.

“I suppose you can get away with a heathen accent as a maths teacher,” added Ms. Gramlich. She was a dry, shrivelled old woman dressed all in stark, severe black, with an ominous metal-reinforced wooden ruler shoved in her waistband.

“I’m from the Great Outdoors,” said Valentine.

“Healthful, that,” said Mr. Caden Gilliard, the Physical Education and Games teacher, a tall, thin man who tended to put one in mind of a pool stick, especially in that he looked like a man who knew just where to strike someone. “I imagine you were chased by bears all the time.”

Valentine decided to humour him. “All the time.” He thought about the Commonwealth’s yao guai.

“They’re like big dogs, you know, bears,” said Gilliard.

“They are absolutely not,” sniffed Ms. Faye Limberg, the Biology and Hygiene teacher. “Bears are a sort of berry plant. They reproduce asexually, you know. And that’s why they go so well with salmon.”

Valentine opened his mouth. He thought better of it. He closed it.

In the back of the room, fiddling with adding a spiral bit to the coffee maker, was Mr. Bhaltair Black, who had somehow so far survived being both a teacher and a Guild Alchemist. He taught practical home Alchemy. He couldn’t teach Guild Alchemy secrets at a general ‘public’ school, but it seemed that there were more than enough basics for him to cover, such as how to duck and cover.

Headmaster Mensick wasn’t in the staff room, commiserating with adulterated coffee and stacks of grubby paper. The school nurse, Ms. Marissa Stalcup, also wasn’t present, having left just as soon as the last PE class let out for the day, thus obviating much of the need for her. Valentine flicked through his notes: the school had a janitor, a ghoul named Mr. Brody Hasting, but he came around at night. He’d briefly encountered the lunch lady, Ms. Jesse Winn. So Valentine had met most of the people he needed to. Now it was just going to be a matter of getting people to talk.

* * *

Valentine stopped by Unseen University on the long walk home to check on his brother, DiMA. He found DiMA quietly editing through a paper while two of his friends were arguing about whether animated paper cranes were totally rubbish or merely overrated.

“Got any opinion on all that?” asked Valentine, gesturing vaguely at the arguing wizarding students.

“No,” said DiMA.

“So, uh, are shadowing lemmas a real thing?” asked Valentine, because that had rather bothered him.

“No,” said DiMA again.

Valentine breathed a sigh of relief, and how strange that still was, breathing. However, if shadowing lemmas weren’t real, then what had killed Mr. Zuleger?

DiMA added, “They are unreal, which makes them more dangerous. Why do you ask?”

Valentine blinked. “So, uh, how mathematical do you have to be before shadowing lemmas to come after you?”

“Usually at least a degree in mathematics, although Chatur there has to beat them off with his staff, but he does come from a long line of mathematicians on both his maternal and paternal sides,” said DiMA, absently looking at one of his classmates, the one who was espousing that animated paper cranes were total whittle.

“Uhm. What about just maths teachers?” asked Valentine.

“I wouldn’t know,” DiMA admitted. “I haven’t studied them extensively.”

“Yeah, so what do they look like?” Now Valentine felt rather nervous.

“Shadowing lemmas?” cut in Chatur. “You have to imagine a pseudo-orbit. Think a numerically computed trajectory with rounding errors on every step.”

“Yeah, rounding errors ‘cos you’re not good enough to get rounding correct,” added Alf.

“No, it’s not like that,” Chatur said testily. “That pseudo-orbit stays uniformly close to some true trajectory with a slightly altered initial position. Got that? Good. Now imagine a lemming, only it’s a pseudo-lemming, and it stays uniformly close to a true lemming…”

“There’s no such thing as a true lemming; Platonic ideals are for people who can’t make time,” argued Zinon.

“The only reason we can’t make time is the Grandfather paradox, though,” said Xian. “Where my Grandfather, blessed may he be, writes me a letter telling me to get back to studying weather magic like I’m supposed to instead of mucking about with chronomancy.”

“That’s not a paradox, that’s nagging, and anyway, I don’t mean making time like that. I mean congress,” clarified Zinon.

“Well, we can’t have congress, either, they’ve got it over in Pseudopolis, and the Patrician won’t hear of us having it here,” said Alf.

“...okay, I’m getting... shadow lemming? outta this?” Valentine interjected.

“Yeah, you can pretty much just step on them,” concluded Chatur.

* * *

Carrot had already adapted to having two Valentines by assigning the second one to Cable Street. Vimes, meanwhile, was trying to adapt to the concept that he had two husbands. Nick and Sybil were still going to just switch off with him every other day, and both Nicks were sharing that same one room, so now that Sam had his night with Nick, he had his night with… Nicks?

Vimes could feel that he was blushing furiously as he joined his Nicks in their bedroom. The human Nick had curled up at the foot of the bed, and the synth neck was sitting up against the headboard reading a book. Vimes's mouth felt dry, and his tongue tripped itself up. Nick greeted, "Hey, doll."

The human Nick rolled over on his back and sniffed at the air.

Vimes sat down on the bed. He knew what he wanted to ask, but the embarrassment of wanting to ask it was stilling his tongue. Vimes went through Nick's nightstand, pulled out a well-thumbed book, and flipped to a glossy picture. The synth Nick smirked crookedly, and the human Nick barked out a laugh.

"Y'want a threesome with me and me?" the synth Nick said lightly.

Vimes flopped down on the bed. "Ah… yes."

"I've been in an entirely new, untouched body for two days, and I'm dealing with all this sensory… stuff, and first thing you want is a threesome with me and me?" said the human Nick, with a playful smile that showed too much of his teeth, as he reached to stroke Vimes's face and then grabbed him by the collar, "Romance me first, jackass."

Vimes opened his mouth and shut it. Valentine had suffered a bizarre magical accident, and Vimes couldn’t imagine what it felt like to suddenly be two people, one of whom was a different species than Valentine was normally. It had to be disorienting. Now, Vimes knew his limitations, and so he asked, “How?”

He was not one of nature’s romantics. Valentine seemed to be, though. If he wanted Vimes to romance him, he could explain what he wanted.

“See, I told you he’d wanna screw you,” said the synth Valentine, as if he’d gotten one over his human self.

“Yeah, yeah, I said he’d want sleep straightaway. So I was wrong. Bite me,” said the human Valentine. “Look, uh… how about we go dancing for an hour or so? Let me get used to this body some more.” 

“Dancing. Uhm. Where?” Vimes said carefully. He didn’t like dancing, but he had to grudgingly admit that Valentine did have a fair point about being romanced first.

“Why don’t we try the Old Eliza?” Valentine suggested brightly.

“Would that be on Old Eliza Lane?” Vimes asked suspiciously.

“Sure,” Valentine said.

“Which is in the Shades,” Vimes said flatly, “and it’s past dark already.”

“Sam, two weeks ago, I went on a stakeout with you in the Shades. We spent eight hours in pitch black freezing rain,” Valentine reminded.

“But we caught those money launderers!” said Vimes.

Both Valentines smiled fondly at him. “Yeah. We did.”

“Not that money backed by von Lipwig’s Golem Standard can ever truly be cleaned up,” Vimes muttered. Money laundering. Bah! “But, point taken, I suppose.”

Vimes still took his sword belt, truncheon, and crossbow, and he fussed over Valentine until he did the same. Watchmen who were assigned to patrol in the Shades were also assigned a holy symbol of their choice, and Vimes had seen the small, plain wooden cross that Valentine favoured, and he saw how Valentine held that cross for a moment now.

The synth Valentine wasn’t coming with them, though. As they left, Vimes felt the need to say, “I am, uhm, interested in both -”

“Sure, sure,” said the synth Valentine, waving him off. 

The human Valentine inhaled thoughtfully. 

Vimes always felt awkward out of uniform, not like Valentine, who had an effortless sense of class and style. Yes, Valentine looked like a particularly dapper organized criminal or like Inspector Lewton, who was in Vimes’s view a disorganized criminal, but Gods, Valentine made it look good. Nonetheless, whatever Valentine looked like in a fedora and trenchcoat, it looked like something that belonged in the Shades, and the Shades were a state of mind.

If there was no Watch, if there was no law to be spoken of in the city, if there was no _justice_ but the justice to be found at the point of a sword, if there was no one to help, you’d look for someone like him if you had a certain sort of problem, and you’d find someone like him in the Shades, because that was where discredited gods, ladies of the night, pedlars in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind, and the nightmares along Elm Street lived; all the people who took the stripped gears of a city’s broken functions and quietly made them work again.

But there was a Watch, and rather than being found in the Shades, the nonhuman synthetic detective lived on Scoone Avenue, and he’d been made a Marquess because a... client loved him.

That wasn’t how the story went, not for old detectives. A married family life was not for the likes of them, but they had it, and a constant low-level terror plagued Vimes that, one day, the universe would wake up and realize that it had made a mistake, and it would come like a tidal wave and wash away all that he loved. He’d lived through that once. True, it hadn’t been real, but it’d been real to him.

But right now, in real reality, the nonhuman synthetic detective was also human, and he was walking beside Vimes, and they were going to dance. He was trying to remember Old Eliza Lane. These days, if a location didn’t feature in any recent major crimes, he had little reason to frequent it. 

On Elm Street, they walked past Ms. Ludmilla Cake, whom Vimes was vaguely aware of, because Angua had stayed in lodgings run by Ludmilla’s mother, Mrs. Cake, for many years, before Angua and Carrot had decided to move in together. He would have questioned why a reasonably attractive woman who wasn’t a Seamstress was out in the dark, walking what was…

His eyes said that Ludmilla was walking a large dog. His eyes insisted that quite stridently to his brain. His brain, which had interacted with Angua for years, said, _Bugger that, that’s a wolf._

Ah, yes, just a reasonably attractive woman walking her wolf in the dark. In Ankh-Morpork, that passed for normal.

Valentine greeted cheerfully, “Ms. Cake! Good night to you.”

Ludmilla gave Valentine a strange look and wrinkled her nose. “You new in town?”

Valentine blinked. “Oh, right, magic accident - I’m Constable Valentine.”

“Oh! Constable Valentine,” said Ludmilla, now with dawning recognition. “Yes, thanks for tracking down that tenant who’d skived out on paying rent.”

“Not a problem,” said Valentine.

“Probably went better for him, that you caught him, than I did,” Ludmilla muttered, regarding her fingernails, which looked quite sharp. “Good night, Constable Valentine. Keep your tail out of trouble.”

Valentine did… _that_ , Vimes reflected. He was helpful and pleasant, and if people weren’t more than half-rotten, they found themselves liking him. 

They found the Old Eliza, which gave Vimes pause as they looked at it from twenty or so paces away. Vimes felt slightly faint, as he recalled why he’d never been here, not even in his drinking days. There was a certain Guild crest placed discreetly near the door, and Vimes said, “Nick, that’s a molly house.”

“Yeah. Where did you think we were going, Sam?” asked Valentine.

“They’re, uhm, brothels -” Vimes started, itching at his collar.

“Not all of them. This one isn’t. It’s a coffee house,” which did not per se mean that it sold coffee and did mean that it sold beer, “and they have fiddling and country dance most nights,” supplied Valentine.

“Uhm. It’s a molly house,” Vimes said again, dumbly.

“Because maybe I’d like to dance with you, and here’s a place where no one’s gonna bat an eye at a man dancing with a man, and maybe we could try some other dance hall, and maybe they’re fine with us, and maybe they’re not, but maybe I don’t wanna run that risk,” said Valentine.

Ankh-Morpork was getting quite a bit better about same-sex couples. They had fewer problems with gangs chasing down queer folk, he knew, not least of all because, emboldened by certain legal changes set into place by the Patrician, a group of lavender ladies had started their _own_ gang, drawn together by a mutual love of both the female form in all its splendours and beating senseless other gangs who wanted to beat them senseless. 

The city progressed, but better wasn’t perfect. So Valentine wanted to avoid a commotion. Could Vimes begrudge him that?

“Why haven’t we been here before?” Vimes asked quietly. He knew Valentine wanted to dance with him. Valentine had commented before about his difficulty at finding a place where they’d both be allowed in together.

“‘Cos I haven’t been human before, and they don’t allow nonhumans,” Valentine replied, equally quietly. “I mean, maybe they’d allow a well-mannered Black Ribboner. I dunno. Never been in there.”

The reason the synthetic Valentine hadn’t come along now became crystal clear to Vimes. He’d have to do something to make it up to his copper-wired angel.

There was someone like a bouncer at the door, who looked at Valentine and Vimes and asked in a bored voice, “Can ye both be vouchsafed as gentlemen of the back door?”

Valentine took Vimes’s hand and answered for both of them, amused, “Oh, sure,” which was well enough, given that Vimes didn’t think he could have answered under any circumstances.

It was a coffee house, and there was a bar, and, promisingly, there was the smell of coffee in addition to the sour scent of stale beer, sticky on the floor. There was a dance floor, and a small stage, and there was a fiddle player, along with three men singing the Hedgehog Song.

Vimes didn’t know one could dance to the Hedgehog Song.

It appeared to be a... country dance, definitely… earthy, but he was sure he did not know those particular dance steps. Vimes whimpered and pushed up against Valentine’s side, because his brain was fizzing, and he didn’t quite know what to do. Valentine slipped his arm around Vimes’s waist and walked him over to the bar, and he ordered, “A coffee with cream and sugar for my sweetheart, here, and I’ll have a beer.”

The large woman at the bar with doughy arms had to be Mrs. Eliza, Vimes was sure, and he was also sure that she wasn’t the first Mrs. Eliza and that she might not even have been born an Eliza, but a place like this had to have an Eliza. She said, “Sure thing, honey,” and got them their drinks.

Vimes sat down with Valentine, clamped his hands around his coffee mug, and looked again. Aside from the, er, dancing, there were men at tables with other men and being quite free with their hands and men sitting on other men’s laps, and there were… “There’s women here?”

Valentine shrugged.

One of the women looked familiar. Was it the face? No, the walk. _Vimes knew that walk._ He started, “That’s -” and he stopped himself.

Another patron, one a few beers in, asked Vimes amiably, “'lo, soldier. You fancy pretty Miss Selina?”

"I'm not a soldier," Vimes snapped. "And no. No, I do not."

“Oh, you like to put your cream in coffee,” the other man said slyly, looking from Vimes’s mug to Vimes’s companion.

“I’m not a beverage,” Valentine said flatly.

Miss Selina, Vimes swore, was Lance-Constable Cedric Johnson, 16 years old, two months fresh out of the Lemonade Factory and still smelling of citrus. The Watch was too big for Vimes to know everyone anymore, but a few weeks ago, while in the middle of diplomatic talks with the ambassador from Fourecks as the Duke of Ankh, Vimes had gone crashing through the window with the Assassin Remora Selachii, who'd taken a contract on the Fourecks Ambassador. He'd literally dropped in on the Lance-Constable outside, who had quite kindly let Vimes borrow his shackles when he was done punching Remora.

If anyone was going to stab that pompous nitwit of an Ambassador, it was going to be Vimes, not some half-wit Assassin. Complain to Vimes about the pooftahs and their planned parade, would he?

Once all that was over with, Vimes had said 'nuts' to diplomatic negotiations for the night and had skived off to teach Cedric how to proceed.

He'd also taken a stab at teaching Cedric how to _see_ , how to develop street eyes, and if Vimes had seen Cedric, dressed as a demure maid and chatting up a ragged mathematician with an abacus hanging out his back pocket, then Cedric - Selina? - had seen his - her? - Watch Commander sitting at the bar with Constable Valentine.

Pride and shame mingled, pride that Cedric had learned so quickly, and shame that Cedric was catching his Watch Commander here, of all places.

Vimes looked away, and he mumbled to Valentine, "I can't dance to this."

The Hedgehog Song came to a close, and Valentine walked over to the fiddler and singers. He asked, "Don't suppose y'all can do a waltz?"

The fiddler and singers laughed. "Your old man's stiff, isn't he?"

"One of his finer points, yes," drawled Valentine.

Vimes turned a hitherto undiscovered shade of purple.

"No, he can learn how to jig a hornpipe to A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End like anyone else, love," said the second singer.

"Five dollars says you can manage a waltz," said Valentine. That was about 1/6th of Valentine's monthly pay, and even split four ways, it was a tidy sum.

"Yes, I do believe five dollars says we can do a waltz," the performers agreed.

Valentine took Vimes to the dancefloor, and Vimes threatened, "I'm buying you a new crossbow."

Where did Valentine get off, buying Vimes's drink _and_ bribing the musicians to play something Vimes knew how to dance to?

“But I’ve gotten used to adjusting for how this one lists to the left. I’ve got the calculations -” Valentine started to say, tone teasing, and then he paused and frowned. “- well, I had the calculations, anyway. Hopefully those’ll just transfer over as knowing what I’m doing…”

It was a Fourecks sort of waltz, with words, but Vimes would be buggered if he could understand what it was about. When they danced, Valentine led, because even if it annoyed Vimes, Valentine actually knew the steps, and if Valentine led, they both were significantly less embarrassed. Vimes couldn’t say that he really understood dance. So it was an excuse for Valentine to hold him. Valentine could hold him at home. But it meant something to Valentine, and for that slim reason, it was worth doing.

There was something pleasant about Valentine’s body up next to his, Vimes had to admit, as close as if they were covering each other in a melee, but with a decidedly lower chance of being punched in the kidney.

When the waltz was over, the performers went right into A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End. Vimes decided that he wanted to explore the building some more, because from the outside, he knew that there had to be backrooms, even though some of the noises he was hearing had him dreading what he might find. 

The back hallways went to many smaller rooms, some of which were open. They contained exactly what they sounded like. Vimes said weakly, “Uhm, they forgot to close that door.”

Another patron, who was watching, beer in hand, said cheerily, “If the door’s open, it’s meant to be open.” Then, he called to the patrons inside the room, “You missed a spot on the left!”

“Y’wanna get a room?” Valentine asked.

Respectable, settled men did not go get a room at a molly house. Vimes was sorely tempted, nonetheless. “What, feeling sufficiently romanced?”

“Pretty close,” said Valentine.

One of the rooms contained a mock birth. Vimes filed that under things he did not understand and, insofar as it probably wasn’t a crime after Vetinari’s recent legal revisions, he put no further effort into attempting to understand it. Valentine steered Vimes out before his brain melted down from overheating, into the cool night air, and he lit up a cigarette and handed his lighter to Vimes.

Then Valentine coughed and looked at his cigarette accusingly. He grumbled, “As far as I can tell, I’m addicted to these things, but the smell gets me every time.” He made a face.

Vimes lit a cigar. “Would you rather give this a try?”

Valentine shut his eyes and coughed again. “No. No offense.”

“None taken,” Vimes said cheerily, because it meant he got to smoke his cigar himself.

They walked back together in the dark, and it was only with the glow of the cigarette and the cigar that something dawned on Vimes: Valentine hadn’t lit a torch either coming or going, and the Shades was rather lacking in the street lamps department. The synth Valentine had installed something called ‘thermal detectors’, and Vimes saw well enough in the dark, but what was going on with the human Valentine?

Vimes chewed on the end of his cigar, because there was a problem with simply asking Valentine about it, and the problem was that Vimes shouldn’t have been able to see in the dark, either. So he simply tucked the thought away, like he tucked the thought away that… entities in the inky black alleys that they passed on the way home would approach within, oh, thirty paces and then stop, coming no closer. It was curious. Vimes reckoned he’d get to the bottom of it, but right now, there was a different bottom he wanted to get to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** Ahahaha! You guys thought you were getting a story about Nick being split into a synth-form and an organic-form, and instead you're getting criticisms of certain types of school systems!
> 
>  **A:** Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion. . . So Far mentions that not only does Ankh-Morpork have molly houses, but that they are run by the Seamtresses' Guild, due to territorial demarcations.
> 
>  **S: As a heads up, the next chapter, chapter 3, will have sexually explicit contents. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip and rejoin us next weekend for chapter 4.**
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	3. The Pleasant Deed (Explicit)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Howl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZweDwbJ_Ic&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=4) by Florence + The Machine.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**
> 
> _  
> **This chapter has sexually explicit contents. If that is not to your taste, feel free to skip and rejoin us with chapter 4.**  
>  _

_The Pleasant Deed_

“You should have a bath. Before,” Vimes said, as they arrived back home.

Valentine sniffed himself and asked, “Do I smell that bad?”

“Nick, you know there are other reasons why you should have a bath before we, ah…” Vimes chided.

“Do I?” Valentine hazarded.

“Would you like me to show you?” said Vimes.

Since they’d restarted their relationship, Vimes had lured Valentine into the bath with him a few times. Vimes loved baths, Valentine could tell. He even loved bubble baths. He loved the general concept of cleaning off so much that he had, years ago, personally paid to make sure that the Watch Houses had showers installed.

Valentine did not love baths. He was vaguely aware that, for humans, if they got water in their ears, there was an unpleasant sensation. For him, it was like that all over his body. Yes, his water seals were still intact. Nothing bad was going to happen to him if he got in the tub. He was just going to be miserable because he was going to be sloshing for hours every time he moved, no matter how good a job he did drying everything out with the soft, fluffy towels that the Vimeses had.

But Vimes loved partnered baths.

“Uh. I think I can figure it out,” Valentine mumbled. 

Why was he dragging his heels now? All of his problems with baths stemmed from being a synthetic man with significant old open wounds. Yet, the concept of having a bath filled him with an unnamable dread. Even something about the word ‘bath’ itself sounded like nails on a chalkboard.

“You sure? I’d be happy to join you,” Vimes offered hopefully.

“I’ll figure it out,” Valentine promised hastily.

* * *

“Look, I talked it over with the other me, and we both agree that I don’t want my first time to be a threesome with myself,” said Valentine, settling down into bed with Vimes.

“But where’s the synth Nick?” asked Vimes, curling up against Valentine.

“Dunno. I like to walk the city,” said Valentine.

Vimes had Valentine half the time. He knew that Valentine liked to go out if he wasn’t with Vimes or wasn’t working. Vimes still fretted.

Valentine pulled off his clothing. It had taken quite a while for Valentine to be comfortable doing that around Vimes. Now Vimes let his gaze track over Valentine’s body. He was handsomely muscled with healthy hair on his arms, chest, back, and legs. They embraced and kissed, and Vimes took his time exploring Valentine’s new body. The synth Valentine’s plastic skin was actually smoother than Sybil’s, but the human Valentine had more hair to his name than Vimes did, and no one would call Vimes smooth. He stroked his fingers through Valentine’s fuzz, feeling the texture, inhaling the way it held Valentine’s scent. Valentine sniffed at the top of Vimes’s head as Vimes progressed down Valentine’s neck. Vimes sniffed back; Valentine had a pleasantly masculine scent to him, not at all like the plastic and metal he’d become accustomed to with his beloved. Yes, very male, indeed. 

The synthetic Valentine wasn’t particularly strong. This human Valentine was, however. Vimes had observed that Valentine was quite a bit stronger than the average human just from little interactions, such as when Valentine pushed back against Vimes when they were in a hug. Why the difference in strength between the two Valentines, he wondered.

Valentine was also curiously unblemished. He had his wrinkles and his laugh lines, but he lacked most of the scars that Vimes would have expected him to have, and Vimes made a very careful exploration of Valentine’s body. He _knew_ that Valentine was the sort to live an incautious life. Vimes asked, “Mr. Stibbons said that this is you if you were native to the Disc?”

“Something like that,” said Valentine.

“You haven’t any scars,” Vimes observed.

“It’s a new body,” said Valentine.

“But you’re addicted to cigarettes,” Vimes said, worrying over it.

“Yeah, and let me tell you, I could go for one in bed,” Valentine sighed.

“And…” Vimes investigated. He tickled Valentine about the navel.

Valentine crumpled into a whimpering, giggling mess in an even more impressive fashion than the synth Valentine did.

“You’re still ticklish,” said Vimes. Then he relented and stopped tickling.

“You’re a sadist,” Valentine wheezed.

“You love me,” Vimes said cheekily.

“I do,” admitted Valentine.

Vimes put his mouth on one of Valentine’s nipples and gave it an experimental flick with his tongue.

“ _Oh_ ,” said Valentine, and he wrapped his hand around the back off Vimes’s head, fingers twined into his hair.

Quite pleased with that reaction, Vimes gave Valentine a right good tweaking with mouth, tongue, and fingers, and Valentine moaned and writhed.

Valentine was, it seemed, quite sensitive all over, practically melting to Vimes’s touch. He laid down, and Vimes positioned himself just a little behind and to the side of Valentine. Valentine rolled just slightly away from Vimes and pulled his top leg up toward himself, giving Vimes room to straddle Valentine’s other leg, his cock head rubbing up against Valentine’s arsehole.

Then he grabbed from the nightstand a rubber glove and some lube. Valentine proved difficult to finger-frigg, almost too sensitive, clamping on Vimes’s finger and whimpering. Vimes murmured, “Relax for me, dear.”

“I’m trying! I want you in me. It’s just… a lot,” said Valentine, rubbing the back of his head. “I feel so touchy. Everything’s strange.”

It _was_ strange, lying with a Valentine who had warm breath against his neck, whose fuzzy chest moved with each exhalation and inhalation, who had a heartbeat that Vimes could feel, pressed against him. There were no fans, no whining servos. No, Valentine panted.

Vimes reached around and played with Valentine’s lovely uncut prick and fondled his balls as he slowly worked his fingers into that enticing hole. It was like the first time he’d had Valentine, or perhaps even slower than that, with more stops and false starts. Valentine was well worth the wait though, clinging perfectly to Vimes’s sonky-wrapped and well-lubed prick. Valentine looked back at Vimes as Vimes thrust into him, the motion more side to side than usual due to the positioning. Vimes hooked his arm under Valentine’s knee to hold up his leg and give himself better access, as Valentine rubbed his own member.

Then to Vimes’s pleasure and embarrassment in equal measure, he came after only a few minutes of buggering Valentine.

That wasn’t a problem that happened often.

“Oh, hells,” Vimes swore. “Uhm, do you want a handie or a blowjob -”

“I want to mount you,” Valentine growled.

Vimes felt agreeable to that arrangement. As they shifted their positions, Vimes noticed that Valentine had, at some point, ripped the sheets. That had happened once or twice with the synthetic Valentine, before Valentine had properly calibrated his metal hand not to dig his fingers too hard into the sheets. He’d insisted on mending the tears in the sheets himself. Now Vimes wasn’t quite sure how Valentine had managed to tear the sheets with perfectly normal fingers...

“Oh,” said Valentine, noticing the rip. “I’ll fix that.”

Vimes sighed, thinking about how Sybil insisted on mending his socks. Apparently, he had a type. How did he have a type?

Valentine piled up a few pillows and bent Vimes over them, arse in the air. He seemed awkward and hesitant at first when he fingered Vimes, seemingly unused to his own fingers. Then he found that sweet spot, and shortly, he replaced his fingers with that lovely stiff prick. Wrapped in a sonky and coated with lube, Vimes couldn’t say that it really felt much different than the synthetic Valentine’s cock, but having a symmetric pair of hands gripping his hips _was_ new. Valentine thrust into Vimes, promising a quick, hard ride to blissful oblivion. He bent down as he railed his husband and nuzzled at the back of his neck.

Valentine had just started to nip teasingly when there was a knock at their door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	4. Balls * Bay Rum Aftershave * The Talk * Test Scores

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Nightwolf pt. 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooKjBAPnKuU&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=5) by Bohren & der Club of Gore.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

__Balls * Bay Rum Aftershave * The Talk * Test Scores_ _

There was a knock at their door.

Valentine and Vimes both groaned and pulled on their nightgowns and went to check the door. Shaun was there, and he clearly looked upset as he complained, “Father, Dad, I had a nightmare again.”

Maybe Shaun was of an age where he should have outgrown nightmares and coming to his parents about nightmares, but he hadn’t actually had a proper childhood, and he’d been through so much. So, their previous activity forgotten, Vimes and Valentine consoled their son.

“I had a nightmare that a Courser was after us,” said Shaun, eyes a little damp. “Only…”

Vimes and Valentine listened.

Shaun frowned and sniffled “...only the Courser looked like Dad. I think that was really the scary part.”

* * *

__Hells, maybe Mr. Stibbons was wrong,__ thought Vimes over a breakfast of cheese that wasn’t trying hard enough, otherwise known as yoghurt, and high-fiber muesli. Maybe Valentine wasn’t as he would have been on the Disc, a human. Maybe Valentine was a Courser. So many little things would make much more sense that way. It didn’t really matter, in any case, Vimes supposed. There was no Institute here.

Human or Courser, Valentine was very particular about his food, Vimes was noticing. Oh, he ate it, but he’d hold his yoghurt up on his spoon and smell it curiously before wolfing it down.

Vimes sighed and asked, “Sybil, dear, were there any upcoming balls that you were wanting to put on my schedule?”

“You have one next week, dear,” replied Sybil.

“Yeah, I put it on your Pip-Boy,” said Shaun.

Shaun had figured out how to put Vimes’s schedule on his Pip-Boy, and Vimes went along with it, because the Pip-Boy was less annoying than a Dis-Organizer. 

“Oh,” said Vimes, staring at his muesli. “Yes. Well. Remind me. I ought to dance with you then. I went out with Nick last night for a dance.”

Fairness was the thing. He had to be fair, or what was he but a miserable excuse for a human being. If he danced with Nick, he had to make sure he danced with Sybil. But now he had two Nicks. It was all very tricky.

Sybil smiled at him. “I shall do that, dear. Did you enjoy yourselves?” She looked to Vimes and his Nicks.

“I did,” Vimes mumbled guiltily.

“I’m always game for a night on the town with my sweetie,” said the human Valentine.

The synth Valentine looked up and said coolly, “Yeah. I swung by the Rimwards New Ankh Station. There was another house collapse. Spent some time helping the boys there pull the timber off the bodies. Three dead. Mother, father, older brother. A little girl survived. The Architect’s Guild is going to take her in. I reckon they’re obligated to.”

Now Vimes stared at him.

“It might make the third page of the evening news. There was a reporter there. I’m sure Sergeant Shoe will have the report in soon,” Valentine concluded.

Ol’ Reg had recently made Sergeant. It probably should have happened sooner, all things considered, but what with the explosive expansion of New Ankh, the Watch was as short-staffed as it had ever been, and Reg had finally got the nudge up. That same explosive expansion of New Ankh was causing no end of trouble. The CMOT Dibbler Practically Real Estate and Associates had houses popping up like mushrooms, often made out of the same thing that mushrooms grew upon, leading to disasters such as the one that Valentine had spent the night sorting through.

So the city progressed.

“That’s dreadful,” Sybil said quietly.

“Happens every day,” Valentine said absently.

“Nick, that is to say, the Nick I didn’t spend the night with - was there anything you were wanting, the next time we’re, ah, together?” Vimes asked.

“Maybe go play ball with the boys?” Valentine said. He had some fake game that involved Vimes’s old Swatter from the Commonwealth. They played it in the backyard sometimes.

The human Valentine perked right up at the mention of playing ball. “Oh yes! Let’s do that. Can we do that?”

Vimes clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He had some pieces of a puzzle, but he was missing the corner piece. “Very well.”

* * *

Seeing how painful the standard deviation of maths preparedness was among the students, who were anything but standard, Valentine let the school children know that they were welcome to come by during lunch or after school or set up another time to go over math with him.

Bhaltair Black, the Alchemist, looked in at Valentine, stuck in the classroom on his lunch break, trying to explain independent variables to one of the gnome children, and the Alchemist commented derisively, “What are you doing, tutoring those bairns outside of class time? You’re missing your lunch break, man, and that’s sacred time.”

Black’s scent was seriously irritating to Valentine for no specific reason he could quantify. He protested, “But no one’s even bothered translating the numbers into Modern Gnomish, and that’s been causing a whole lot of confusion.”

“Oh, aye,” said Black, “That’s how you get them on the exams. I don’t ken how you expect to get them on the exams if they actually know the answers.”

“Exams aren’t like booby trapping a house!” said Valentine, which he belatedly realized was an oddly specific thing to say. “I’m not tryin’ to catch them out. I just want to assess what they know and what they still need to be taught.”

“Ye’re a madman, Zwicky, a madman of a mathman,” Black sneered, taking his leave.

Valentine shook himself out. “Right, so, you were saying that ‘Nid’ has been translated as ‘no’, and so you were thinking that meant the same thing as ‘zero’...”

Briybar Umlin, one of the gnomish students, said, “Actually, ken you go over the independent variables again? They’re not just variables wot have dressed up in blue paint an’ forgotten to shower n’ shave?”

“N-no, although I guess I can see where you got that idea,” Valentine admitted, thinking about the differences between Buggy Swires and Wee Mad Arthur.

There was a knock at the classroom door that was oddly shy despite its loudness, and a moment later, the door swung open, and Moonstone, one of the troll girls, poked her head inside the classroom. Valentine waved her over, directing, “Pull up a seat, Moonstone. Now Briybar, an independent variable is a variable that doesn’t depend on another variable.”

“That like my Aunt Larimar,” opined Moonstone. “My mama tell her, ‘Lari, you need hit man over the head with rock soon or you no get man,’ but my Aunt Larimar, she say, ‘Don’t need no man. Got thriving, successful concessions business,’ She sell snack size pumice at horse races. Really tasty.” Moonstone nodded, with apparent satisfaction.

The corner of Valentine’s mouth scrunched up. “Kind of.”

“You’re sure the independent variable don’t make a bit of a waily waily?” asked Briybar, skeptical.

“This is, I think, getting to be a bit more of a Morporkian language problem than a math problem,” Valentine muttered.

Moonstone dragged over a chair and threw herself down into it. “Hokay, so, how you use dem statistics to figure out what horse finish last?” 

Valentine was vaguely aware that there was a stereotype about girls being crazy about horses, and he supposed that stereotype might transcend species boundaries. Then, with this being Ankh-Morpork, greatest and oldest and most decadent and depraved of cities, of course girls were into fixing bets on horse races. Sure, why not?

A little laugh escaped him.

“Wait, you want to know which horse is going to finish last?” Valentine asked, blinking.

“‘De Last Shall Be First’ work a lot better dan ‘First Past de Post’,” said Moonstone, shrugging.

__Oh__ , thought Valentine, thinking about troll officers he’d worked with. The troll concept of time was radically different than that of most sapient beings, although get a troll officer and a golem officer discussing the concept of time, and boy, you could make some pretzels. Valentine stretched, cracking his knuckles. “Okay, as a little extra credit project - and this is open to both of you and any of your friends - I’ll make up some sheets of statistics about these ponies, and you fill them out with the values and bring them back, and then we can go over future performance calculations together?”

“‘Kay,” said Moonstone, and Briybar nodded enthusiastically.

That was more engaged with math than he’d seen them so far.

__Oh God.__ Valentine was going to teach kids how to play Moneyball at horse racing. Headmaster Mensick was going to tan his hide. Wait. This was Ankh-Morpork. 

Teaching kids to play Moneyball at horse racing was practic’ly patriotic.

* * *

Vimes knew that he ought not just wander into Valentine’s dressing room uninvited. It was a man’s sanctum. He excused himself with, “I just wanted to make sure that you were getting the hang of shaving -”

Valentine was slightly bent over the sink, face lathered, and he murmured, “I’m managing, doll.”

“If there was anything that you needed a hand with -” Vimes offered hopefully, standing just behind Valentine, barely touching.

“Sweetheart, I’m just the sort of man who has a five o’clock shadow at noon. I don’t need help,” Valentine drawled. “So unless you’re looking for a quickie when I’m done shaving -”

“Oh fine, that’s it,” Vimes confessed, relieved that Valentine was better at reading between the lines than Vimes was at writing between them. “I, ah, do feel quite contrite that I wasn’t able to do my duty by you that last time.”

“It happens,” Valentine said equanimously, as he finished up shaving. He rinsed thoroughly and patted his face dry with a towel. Then he poured out a shilling-sized amount of aftershave onto his palm, rubbed his hands together, and rubbed them over his face.

“Bay rum aftershave?” Vimes asked, sniffing Valentine.

“I felt like I needed something,” said Valentine, a touch defensively.

“It’s manly,” Vimes said, in a way that he hoped was reassuring, placing his hands on Valentine’s hips. “Like my handsome man.”

Valentine tensed against him and mumbled, “Red.”

Vimes blinked. They used green for go, yellow for pause, and red for stop. Since Ankh-Morpork had acquired its own traffic lights, Vimes had endured some embarrassing moments getting used to them. He backed away and put up his hands.

Valentine shook slightly, hands balled. “I’m not handsome. This isn’t me. This -” he pointed at the mirror accusingly, “- is the original Nick Valentine.”

Vimes knew that Valentine had identity issues. His issues were glaring like a gorgon without her sunglasses. Vimes offered softly, “I can see that you’re upset, dear, but how can you tell that you look like the Pre-War human Nick Valentine?” 

Valentine’s reflection in the mirror blinked. “I… I think this is how he looked?”

“Do you really think those silly wizards or Hex actually bothered to figure out what the Pre-War human Nick Valentine looked like?” Vimes prodded. “He was backstory. For you.”

“Hancock doesn’t even know what his brother’s first name is,” Valentine mumbled, “because no one bothered to fill in that detail.”

“Didn’t they say this is you, as you would be, if you were native to the Disc?” Vimes asked.

“I guess so?” Valentine admitted. “I just… I dunno. I’m human. I woulda figured I’d be a golem or something.”

“You’re an old detective. There are old golems, and there are golem detectives, but none of the old golem detectives have been detectives for very long,” Vimes observed. The Sto Plains had been heavily humanocentric for centuries.

“You really think I’m handsome?” Valentine asked faintly.

“Yes, dear. Yes, I do,” said Vimes, “and I am a bloody lucky devil to get two of you.”

* * *

Vimes had an open door policy at his office in the sense that, if someone was willing to open his door and brave his default grumpy expression, he was willing to at least listen to their first sentence.

Among the people willing to knock on his door, open it, and hesitantly clear their throats, Vimes wouldn’t have expected Lance-Constable Cedric Johnson, but he was going to have to update his list now. Not looking up from Pessimal’s latest deep-dive report on the Merchants’ Guild tax returns, Vimes prompted, “Yes?”

“Er, sir… sorry to trouble you, I was just wondering if I could ask you about something that’s not at all related to work. For some advice,” Cedric stammered.

“Knock yourself out,” Vimes grunted.

In a very, very small voice, Cedric asked, “I don’t suppose you could give me, you know, the Talk, sir?”

Vimes looked up and over Cedric and at an unspecified spot on the ceiling. Slowly, he said, “I imagine that’s something your parents ought to have done a few years ago.”

Cedric mumbled, “Yessir, I’d agree with that, sir, only they kicked me out at age six for getting caught trying on my mum’s clothes, so…”

Vimes drummed his fingers on his desk, making a mental note to ask Carrot what the statute of limitations on child abandonment was.

Cedric added, blushing, “There’s this fellow I fancy, sir, and we’ve been wanting to get serious, and well, I’ve seen things, y’know, but everyone knows that the naughty woodcut postcards ain’t how it works in real life, sir.”

Vimes briefly wondered if he could punt this to Valentine. He sighed, certain he was beet red. “I’m hardly an expert, but for starters, you ought to know that Watchmen can get free sonkies…”

* * *

Valentine, the synthetic one, met up with Piper at the Artful Angel. It was known for its cask-conditioned ales, and Piper was a gal who could appreciate a beer. The Guild of Artificers used the Artful Angel as a meeting place, which maybe explained the carefully geared __Pax Morporkia__ coin-operated game in the corner.

Piper cheerily tucked into her steak and kidney pie and took a satisfied drag of her ale. Then she turned a critical eye on Valentine and said, “Nicky, you’re sulking.”

Valentine tried his ale. “I am not.”

“You are too,” Piper insisted. “What’s up with my favourite synth?”

There were a grand total of four synths on the Disc: Valentine, DiMA, Shaun, and a Gen 2 who lived with a family down on Monkey Street. First out of four. What a prize. Only, now there was a Valentine who wasn’t a synth, one who was flesh and blood, a real man, who was the damned spitting image of the original Nick Valentine. “What have I told you about prying?”

“Works better if I get a crowbar?” said Piper, smiling winsomely.

“That ain’t what I said,” Valentine drawled.

“Fine. How’s your other half doing?” asked Piper.

“Do you mean Sam or do you mean the human me?” said Valentine.

“Both, I guess,” said Piper.

And it just slipped out. “Well, Sam’s got a me that’s an actual man, so they’re swell, I reckon.”

Piper’s expression turned sympathetic. “Oh, Nicky. Don’t tell me that Blue’s been ignoring you. I’ll have a word with him, if he’s been mistreating you.”

“Well, no,” Valentine said hastily. “Sam hasn’t been ignoring me.” If anything, Sam was rather worriedly trying to be scrupulously fair about paying equal amounts of attention to his partners. He was a man who couldn’t stand unfairness. “I just… want to give him and my better half some room. Sam deserves a nice human man, not a wreck like me.”

Piper gave Valentine a level stare. “Do you listen to yourself? Have you actually met Blue? That man turned down how many humans just in the Commonwealth alone while he was dating you?”

“Two, and you and Preston were both way too young for him!” Valentine argued.

Piper planted her hands on the table, lightly rattling her cutlery. “Maybe, but c’mon, that man is a xenophile.”

“He turned down the brain in a robot, too,” Valentine pointed out.

“Yeah, so would I. That’s just weird,” opined Piper. “Look, I’m just saying that Blue is clearly into the __clank clank clank__.”

“I do not __clank clank clank__!” Valentine protested crossing his arms.

Piper rolled her eyes. “Not with that attitude, you don’t.”

* * *

“Oh good, you’re both here,” said Vimes, when both the synth Valentine and the human one accompanied him back to bed.

“Heh,” said the synth Valentine, looking self-conscious. “You really want that threesome, huh?”

“Actually, I just want sleep,” Vimes corrected. “I can’t sleep very well if I can’t hear Sybil’s, ah… breathing,” Sybil snored, but Vimes had been married long enough to know that he should never mention that fact, “or your fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with your breathing, of course, I’d like you to keep breathing until the wizards can get you put back together. It’s just that you,” and he looked at the synthetic Valentine, “and your fans have been a bit scarce these last few nights.”

The synth Valentine rubbed the back of his head. “Maybe I wanted to give you and me some space.”

“Oh Nick,” Vimes sighed, burying his face in a pillow.

The queen bed was big enough for Vimes, who wasn’t a large man, and Valentine, but adding a second Valentine started to make matters cramped.

When Vimes woke up in the morning, the human Valentine had curled up at the foot of the bed. 

* * *

“These test scores can’t be right,” said Headmaster Mensick, several days after Valentine had handed them in.

Valentine was pretty sure they were. He was no machine, not anymore, but he was still very, very good with math. “What’s the problem?”

“Moonstone can’t have scored better than Wilburn Dendy,” Mensick said, looking nervous.

“Why, because he’s on Mentats?” drawled Valentine. In every class he taught, he’d clocked that one or two of the humans or dwarfs were on mentats. They weren’t on them every day, just if there was a test. Some of the more high-strung kids broke out the Mentats even for quizzes. Mentats weren’t illegal, but Valentine still wasn’t thrilled that children were getting into them.

For one thing, one of their main ingredients was lead.

Mensick looked flustered, and he stammered, “That’s a very serious accusation -”

“No, that’s a pretty casual accusation,” said Valentine, leaning back. “My accusations get a whole lot more serious than that. But the kid’s got red-stained lips around test time, and I’ve seen him popping those little red pills.”

Mensick pressed his lips into a frown. “Everyone knows that Moonstone is… slow. Wilburn has always been a top student.”

“Most trolls are taught by their parents to count in base four. Do you know what mathematical bases are?” asked Valentine.

“I don’t have anything to do with base behaviour,” Mensick said frostily.

So Valentine launched into a little lecture on mathematical bases. Mensick took longer to get it than the children did.

“You’re saying the little chips off the block were getting their math problems wrong because of their heathen counting system?” Mensick said slowly.

“I’m saying they were producing correct answers… if you assumed a base four counting system, except for Scapolite in first form, but his work checks out as correct in base two. So I taught ‘em how to convert back and forth into other base systems, explained register shifting, and let ‘em know humans and dwarfs mostly count in base 10,” said Valentine.

“Oh,” Mensick said weakly.

“Some of these pebbles have been in school what, three, four years? And no one’s noticed that trolls don’t count like humans and dwarfs?” said Valentine, searching Mensick’s face.

“Uhm, everyone knows that culturally, trolls just don’t… perform like the other species,” Mensick hemmed.

Valentine smiled unpleasantly. “Right. I’m so glad that you agree that troll students have different educational needs that deserve to be respected.”

Mensick blinked. He appeared quite sure that wasn’t what he’d agreed to at all. “But, uhm, you see, Wilburn’s parents are quite influential -”

“By his parents, would you mean his father who thinks the undead are taking jobs away from the living?” Valentine asked, morbidly curious.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Mensick, in a way that suggested that he did. “I do know, however, that the Dendy family always pays their tuition fees on time and has, in fact, made a very generous donation to the school...”

“So? What is this, pay for grades?” Valentine asked bluntly.

“You might consider tutoring him after school,” Mensick said reproachfully.

“Funny. That offer’s been on the table to anyone who cares to show up,” said Valentine. It was mainly the nonhuman kids who took him up on it. Very funny how that worked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S: As a heads up, the next chapter, chapter 5, will have sexually explicit contents. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip and rejoin us next weekend for chapter 6.**
> 
> **S** : I always headcanon’d that whoever did the initial translation of troll numbers to Morporkian really screwed trolls over (probably not maliciously, but still through negligence). There’s a remark that trolls “can’t count above three”, and then an explanation that this is a misunderstanding because they count, “one-two-three-many,” and which ignores the idea that many can be a number (“many-one, many-two, many-three”), and this went right on until you get many-many-many-three right to lots.
> 
> This is pretty much just base four counting. 
> 
> My assumption in-universe for what’s going on is that whoever it was who first tried to translate troll counting pretty much thought to themselves, “I’m not sure what they’re saying once they get past three, but it can’t be four because they start repeating themselves right after, so they must be losing track of the count because they’re so dumb or something. We’ll just call it ‘many’, since it’s clearly too many for them!”
> 
> I think my headcanon is somewhat supported in Men-At-Arms, where Detritus is shown to be a natural at counting at base two.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	5. Drive vs Driven (Explicit)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**
> 
> _  
> **This chapter has sexually explicit contents. If that is not to your taste, feel free to skip and rejoin us with chapter 6.**  
>  _

_Drive vs Driven_

Maybe Nick should have locked his bedroom door, but it wasn’t just his bedroom door, and it wasn’t like he thought this was going to take that long. Wanking off. Jerking it. Rubbing one out. Every cock-having guy knew how, right? And this was Ankh-Morpork. If a guy didn’t have a cock, Mr. Scrope’s leather shop could sell him one.

While Nick had sex pretty regularly, he hadn’t actually masturbated alone before. He hadn’t needed to, not until now, when he suddenly had _glands_ and _hormones_ , and he found that he was hankering to get off, even if it wasn’t with his husband. But he rubbed his cock all the time when they made love, and sometimes they’d give each other handjobs, either separate or together. How hard could it be?

Nick laid back on his empty bed and rubbed his hard, aching cock, thinking about… Supervisor White? He sat up, frowning. Damn, but he needed better material in his fantasies. Nick had no idea what Jenny had looked like. Sam. He loved Sam. Sam… cleaned up okay, with the blood and the grime off him. So he was a scrawny middle-aged guy with so many scars he didn’t remember where he’d gotten some of them, and he was going grey.

Nick was into that, though. That worked. That worked so well that the usually attentive detective was startled when the door opened and he found himself staring guiltily at himself.

“Oh. Huh. That’s new,” said the synth Valentine, closing the door behind him and wandering over to their bookshelf.

Nick groaned and flopped back against the bed, draping a hand over his forehead.

“Now don’t stop on my account. We’re the same man. What’s there to hide?” the synth said airily, selecting an old history book that had come out of Sybil’s family’s personal collection.

“Yeah, but you don’t - I didn’t when I was - look, I’ve got a sex drive. You’re just sex driven,” Nick sputtered.

“Harsh,” said the synth, rolling his optics. He sat down in their chair with his book.

“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t mean it that way!” Nick protested.

“Yeah, yeah. What, can’t get lil’ Nick off?” the synth asked lightly.

“Well, I was _this_ close - look, could you lock the door?” Nick said.

“Oh, sure. Anything for me,” said the synth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	6. The 25th of May * Mango Steam Hawk * Whalebone Lane Parish Register

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [AWOLNATION](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2PsXT88UeU&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=6) by Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf).
> 
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_The 25th of May * Mango Steam Hawk * Whalebone Lane Parish Register_

May 25th was Young Sam’s birthday. As far as Shaun could remember, it was also Shaun’s birthday. This had caused a fair amount of brotherly drama and had led, a few days prior, to the synth Valentine needing to go find Shaun, who had flounced off to go sulk at the lobby of the Artificer’s Guild, where he’d been distracting himself by chatting up a clacks engineer.

Shaun had been forced to change his name without word one about how he felt about it or whether or not he liked the new name. He wasn’t going to change his birthday, too! So what if he was just a copy of young Sam? He was a good copy! And that meant that he’d gotten the little details, like birthdays, correct.

Valentine just sighed and hugged him and took the poor kid home. Identity issues. Boy, but Nick Valentine could relate, especially in this time, with a second him running around, looking the spitting image of the human Nick Valentine, who’d never actually existed. Between him and Shaun, their family was a mess when it came to this sort of thing4.

But today was the day, and that meant a special birthday breakfast, which, according to Codsworth’s gossip the night before, was going to consist of muesli shaped like velocipedes, both the boys being rather obsessed with the velocipedes they’d received for Hogswatch. Shaun had tinkered a small one-cylinder steam engine onto his velocipede. It frightened horses, and Sybil wouldn’t allow it near the swamp dragons.

What neither the synthetic nor the human Valentine had been expecting was for Vimes to show up to breakfast in his full ceremonial Watch Commander armor, with a little tube containing a sprig of lilac affixed to it. The human Valentine had been smelling the lilac, though, heady with spring.

Both Valentines looked at Vimes from two angles. They glanced over at Sybil and then at young Sam. They reached a conclusion. Neither of them asked Vimes about the lilac. Valentine knew how to read a mood, saw how Vimes’s face went flinty when Valentine looked at the lilac.

“Why can’t we open the gifts now?” asked young Sam, in between shovelling velocipede-shaped muesli into his face.

“Because we’re opening them after supper,” said Sybil.

Young Sam looked over at his father and asked, “But why?”

Vimes replied, “I suppose because you were born late in the day,” which was actually a coherent and cogent reason why to put off the gifts until later.

Young Sam then attempted a daring gambit and asked the Valentines, “But if we opened them now, we’d have less to do later, right?”

“Y’know…” started one and the other continued, “sometimes, the anticipation’s half the fun.”

“No, it’s not,” young Sam said primly, sulking to be foiled.

Birthday or no birthday, the Valentines had work. The human one went off to school where he was still just trying to get all of his students on the same page. The synth one was assigned at Pseudopolis Yard, and he picked up Artificial Flavours and noticed something interesting. Over at the tea kettle, Nobby was wearing lilac. Valentine let his gaze rest on the lilac until Nobby noticed that his lilac was being looked at, upon which he turned himself around and busied himself with pouring himself a cup of tea and kept on pouring well after the tea cup was full.

Sergeant Reg Shoe, who had finally been promoted past the rank of Corporal that had clung to him like a descriptive adjective, was just coming off night shift as Valentine was coming on, and Valentine noticed that Reg, too, wore a lilac sprig.

But unlike Vimes or Nobby, who shut down when Valentine looked at the lilac, Reg noticed what Valentine was looking at and waved him aside. He greeted, “You want to ask about it, don’t you?”

“That’s a pretty good default assumption about me,” Valentine allowed. He was a nosy bastard and knew it.

“It’s one of those things where you had to be there,” said Reg, looking far away.

Okay, so something where Vimes, Nobby, and Reg were there… that narrowed the timeframe. Valentine grunted, “Thanks for the tip.”

“Uhm, what are you even talking about?” said Artificial Flavours. 

Rats had good senses of smell, but they were pretty nearsighted. Valentine said, hushed, “Don’t worry about it, Flavours, I’ll look it up in the newspaper archives or the library -”

“You won’t find it in the newspaper articles, and there aren’t any good accounts in any library,” Reg said, and there was a hint of bitterness. “But you can look up my death record in the Whalebone Lane parish register. Now, I’ve got somewhere to be.”

Rumour on the street was that ol’ Reg Shoe had been murdered. Curiouser and curiouser.

Later in the day, while Artificial Flavours grabbed a quick bite to eat in a cozy dumpster, despite the Watch House canteen boasting quality _avec_ on the menu, Valentine checked the Lemonade Factory where the Custody Office was occupied by Fred Colon. He was wearing lilac. _Bingo_.

Otherwise, it was an uneventful day of walking and talking. Valentine and Flavours parted ways at the end of the shift. He itched to go check that parish register, but that could wait. He had a birthday party to attend. It was outside, in the garden, near Sybil’s swamp dragon pens.

Nat had been invited, which meant that Piper had come along, which meant that if anything interesting happened at the ducal heir’s birthday party, the _Times_ had the story, which meant that Vimes was resolutely determined that absolutely nothing interesting was going to happen.

An interesting open question remained: which boy was the ducal heir, anyway? Vimes and Sybil hadn’t exactly shouted to the world that their older-appearing boy was a synth copy of their younger-appearing boy.

Some of young Sam and Shaun’s school friends had been invited. An elderly house dragon was eying the gifts. Dogmeat had shown up. He did that.

Dogmeat was particularly interested in the human Nick Valentine, sniffing him like he was a mailbox.

What Valentine had not expected but realized that he should have was that Sybil had invited DiMA, and insofar as there was a clearly marked time and location on the invite, DiMA had shown up. Of course Sybil had invited DiMA. He was the boys’ uncle, and he lived in town.

But at the appearance of DiMA, Vimes complained to his wife, “You invited him?”

Sybil gave Vimes a look that suggested that not only was he being ridiculous but that she didn’t have time for him being ridiculous. “Yes, dear, like any good hostess, I invited the boys’ uncle.”

“Well, fine, but you could have invited Deacon -” Vimes started.

The human Valentine was investigating one of Sybil’s draconic-shaped topiaries.

“I did, dear. His daughter needs to be properly socialized,” said Sybil.

“Daughter!?” sputtered Vimes, looking wildly around the garden.

The human Valentine appeared to have found Deacon and commented, “You’d do a better job of pretending to be a topiary if you hadn’t eaten the Lancre bleu from the cheese tray first.”

“Aw,” said Deacon.

Vimes, having sighted Deacon, immediately stalked over to him, intent on interrogation.

The synth Valentine, though, just asked Sybil, “Deacon has a daughter?” He looked carefully at the group of children playing. He didn’t pick up young Sam and Shaun from school often, but he had a few times, so he recognized some of those kids, and of course he knew Nat. Which one was not like the others?

“I believe that he adopted her not long after returning from diplomatic duty in Ephebe,” said Sybil.

Ah-hah, he’d seen that child before, and not at the Frout Academy. He knew the way that one moved. He’d seen him - her? - at one of Carrot’s youth group initiatives. Valentine had been giving a lesson on the clacks. Most of the kids had been bored to slumber. That one had paid attention.

DiMA set two small, rectangular packages neatly wrapped in old newspaper on the pile of gifts, and while he looked ready to greet Valentine, he found himself mobbed by Shaun, who greeted, “Uncle DiMA!”

Young Sam caught sight of that and decided that he was obligated to go occupy DiMA’s other side with a counter-hug. “What’d you get us? Is it magic?”

“I would suggest that you could tell me,” DiMA said.

4 Nick Valentine was not aware that Sam Vimes had been his own mentor, in the form of John Keel. But if he had known, he would have said that it just figured.

* * *

"You adopted. A child," said Vimes, who somehow managed to loom over Deacon, despite being significantly shorter. They stood together in a secluded part of the expansive manor garden.

"Eh, sure,” said Deacon, shrugging, “I let myself get roped into helping Carrot with one of his 'youth programs', and this one kind of grew on me. You know. Like a glowing fungus."

"I thought you were all about not letting yourself form connections that could be used against you," said Vimes, eyes narrowed.

"What, you mean as part of the incoherent, fictional backstory a bunch of student wizards saddled me with?" Deacon spat out bitterly. "Well obviously, I need to let _that_ restrict what I do with my life. This way I get to have all the paranoia and closed-off-loneliness and _charming personality quirks_ that come from a lifetime of trauma, but none of the actual fun of living through it first. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to have lost to make me so terrified of losing anything else." He sighed. "Must have been pretty incredible, though."

Vimes allowed Deacon a moment of silence. Then he spoke, "All right, well. I understand that, but... this, Deacon? She's not some tool for your own growth as a person, she's a _child_."

Deacon gave a dismissive, casual wave. "Well, sure, that's why I went for a low maintenance model that was used to taking care of herself. I figured I couldn't do any worse than the 'nothing' she's got going on currently."

That couldn’t have done anything other than make Vimes angry. He fumed, "This isn't some kind of joke, Deacon. There are ways you can bring up a child that are absolutely worse than 'nothing,' I see them every week!"

Deacon backed away and put his hands up in placation. "What do you want me to say, Sam? That I'm terrified? That I can't remember ever being more frightened, not in any of my fake memories, not when I was convinced that you were a synth ready to lead an army of Coursers into our safehouses, or when I came here and realized that my whole life was a bigger lie than any of the whoppers I ever told? That having this one kid dependent on me has got me more spooked than any of the weird nonsense I've managed to uncover in the magic warped tunnels and lost temples and whatever else you have buried underneath this city? Because okay, sure, you're right, I'm terrified, but what do I do? Just toss her aside like every other adult she's ever had in her life?" 

The smouldering volcano that was Sam Vimes settled into a longer moment of silence. Finally he asked, "What's she like?"

"Oh, well, she's either eight or nine or ten,” said Deacon, counting off on his fingers, “depending on when you ask; and she's a lost princess from a barbarian tribe, or the Ramtops, or far Uberwald who's been sent into hiding except that she's also a foundling left on the Assassins’ Guild doorstep but she decided they weren't tough enough for her and her mother is either in a wagon gang in Fourecks or the leader of a small anti-Druid resistance cell in Llamedos. I'm pretty sure that her birth name isn't Mango Steam Hawk, but I figure names we pick for ourselves are more important, anyway, so Mango it is, at least until she changes her mind. Oh, and she was introduced to me as a he. That seems to be a matter of not showing weakness on the street, but I'm also not sure she's made up her mind yet, so I'm ready if it changes again. And also, I'm pretty sure she doesn't know that I know she occasionally sneaks into the Lost Boys Tavern to check their board."

Vimes slowly exhaled a deep breath that he had been holding. "Oh." He paused, hesitating, and then he called it. "So she reminded you of you."

Deacon gave in to a wry smile. "A bit, yeah."

Vimes paused again, staring off into the distance. "Mango Steam Hawk, huh?"

Deacon confirmed, "Yeah. Gotta admit, Whispers, that's a better name than anyone had in the Railroad. I feel pretty inadequate around her, just going by 'Deacon'."

After another pause, Vimes put his hand on Deacon’s shoulder and looked him hard in the eyes. "For what it's worth, I don't think you, personally, will mess up worse than nothing. But if you need help, I'm here."

* * *

As it turned out, DiMA had gotten young Sam and Shaun books. They appeared to be perfectly mundane books, translations of Ephebian philosophy. Vimes did not trust them. 

Sybil had knit the boys thick, lumpy sweaters, which was exactly what they didn’t need, what with summer coming, and she’d knit little swamp dragon designs into them.

Deacon had gotten young Sam a goldish falchion of Tsortese make, a souvenir from his diplomatic trip.

Sybil nodded as young Sam opened up the blade and proceeded to take it up against a topiary. She observed, “You know, Sam, we really are overdue about getting him into sword lessons.”

Vimes nodded. “I suppose you’re right, dear.”

Deacon tilted his head to one side. “Yeah, real sword lessons for an eight year old, great idea."

Vimes shrugged. “I was already in a gang when I was…” he looked over at Sybil, “...well, you studied swordplay in school, didn’t you, dear?”

“Oh yes. Jolly good calisthenics,” said Sybil, smiling.

Shaun got a book from Deacon. Vimes had already checked over the books that DiMA had given them. Then he checked the book from Deacon, which appeared to have been published on a small home printing press. It was titled _The Smoking GNU Cookbook_ , and the first chapter was about how to crack clacks systems. Vimes turned a stony glare at Deacon, who grinned back at him.

Piper had gotten the boys each their own newspaper, with a sheepish explanation of, “Hey. The free press might cost something, but I’m not made of money.” 

Valentine had apparently ceded to the boys’ extortion demands that since he was two people, he owed each of them two gifts. Shaun got two completely different boxes of mechanical scraps. Young Sam was given a fedora and trenchcoat sized just for him.

* * *

After the party, the synth Valentine went out for a look-see at the Whalebone Lane parish register. There, he found it: _May 25, 1957 UC. Reg Shoe, age 22. Cause of death: several crossbow bolts while commiting seditious actions._

Another hand had added, in a different shade of brown ink, in the margin: _Posthumously pardoned._

Murdered, huh? That wasn’t quite what Valentine had expected of ol’ Reg. Sure, Reg would show up at Guild strikes, even ones that were completely irrelevant to him, because he just liked showing up and shouting, ‘Solidarity!’ He’d show up at grassroots movements and help them organize. But sedition?

1957 UC was long before the newspaper. He checked the part of the Unseen University library that was available to the public. The Librarian regarded him dourly and folded his hands, as if to say, _There is nothing for you here._

But what he said was, “Ook.”

The history books appeared to gloss over 1957 UC. It was the year that the Patrician Snapcase took power. He’d later be known as the Mad Lord Snapcase, but it seemed that he hadn’t started out that way. Despite cross-referencing a dozen books on the general time period, Valentine couldn’t even get a good handle on how Snapcase had replaced Winder.

There was no mention of anything on Whalebone Lane.

Eventually, he found a slim volume that had been a wizard’s thesis project. The fact that he’d found it meant that it wasn’t magic, which was unusual. Mundanes weren’t allowed at the magic books in the library. It was a piece of theoretical history conjecture. If the rebels had properly guarded the gates...

There’d been a revolution. A small, brief one. And then it had all turned around again and gotten ground under the wheel of time like a rotten fruit into the street cobbles. That was what Valentine got out of it, putting the book, with its byzantine _if-then_ s back on the shelf.

It was past dark when he visited Reg Shoe’s grave in the Cemetery of Small Gods. The ground was freshly broken. Not far off, there was a wooden grave that had on it a hardboiled egg tied with purple ribbon and a large lilac wreath: _John Keel_.

Carefully carved underneath the name was:

_How Do They Rise Up_

* * *

Sybil liked reading books. Valentine liked reading books. Sybil liked reading books and discussing them. Valentine just plain liked talking. They’d read _The Da Quirm Code_ , a recent popular thriller, and the day after the boys’ birthday party they met up in the Yellow Drawing room. Sybil lounged on the love seat, casually sprawled, while the synth Valentine sat in a chair.

He started, “Can we both just acknowledge that was terrible?”

“I have read better books,” said Sybil, who had been brought up not to say anything if she couldn’t say something nice.

“I will take that,” said Valentine. “Actually, before we get into it, I was wondering… were you around in Ankh-Morpork during May 1957 UC?”

Sybil thought. “Oh, I would have been a teenage girl, then… but yes, I was home on a break from the Quirm Academy. Why do you ask?” She looked puzzled.

“I don’t know, and I guess that’s why I’m asking.” Valentine leaned back in his chair. “Anything funny happen that month?”

“Well, it was the month that Lord Winder was, uhm, retired, and Lord Snapcase replaced him,” Sybil said slowly, thinking.

“Anything else?” Valentine prodded gently.

After some time, Sybil added, “My father said there were ‘some riots by the lower-class rabble’. We didn’t involve ourselves in that.”

That was how Sybil would have thought about a revolution, wasn’t it? Nice dame, but so sheltered it was almost a crime.

The door to the hallway was open. The human Valentine walked by, following along after young Sam and Shaun with a bat, ball, and catcher’s mitt in his arms, and Sybil watched him go. She sighed, “You do make quite the man, Nick.”

Sybil had a small, awkward crush on him, Valentine knew. He’d known for months. He also knew that Vimes could be the jealous kind. So Valentine had studiously done nothing about Sybil’s crush. They went to the opera and ballets and musicals together, and they read books, and they even practiced swordplay, though she got more out of it than he did. Any other context, and he’d say they were dating. She’d been close enough to kiss. He never let her close the distance.

But put red blood in his veins, and Sybil looked at Valentine even more thoughtfully. Of course she did. She’d want a real man, like Vimes.

“It’s only for a few months, until the wizards put me back together,” Valentine mumbled, looking down.

Sybil blinked. “Oh, I didn’t mean specifically your other self. I was just looking at him taking the boys out for some exercise, and it reminded me.” She looked at him fondly. “We’re quite lucky to have you.”

Valentine squirmed slightly. “So… that book. Took me less than a second to figure out it was mirror writing…”

* * *

When the flesh and blood Valentine took the boys outside to play, Dogmeat turned up. He’d been doing that more often. Oh, he visited the Vimes manor frequently enough, but he wasn’t a family pet. Dogmeat went where he was needed. 

Right now, Dogmeat seemed to think that giving Valentine an exhaustive sniffing was what was needed. Dogmeat had been doing that a lot lately, too.

Puzzled, Valentine asked, “Is it my aftershave?”

But Dogmeat didn’t have anything to say. He just barked. It almost sounded like, ‘No,’ though.

Almost.

Great, Valentine was starting to think that dogs could talk.

Shaun threw a ball, and Valentine’s head whipped around, eyes tracking the ball’s arc, as Dogmeat took off running to chase it. For a moment, he’d tensed. For a moment, he’d almost gone running, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S: As a heads up, the next chapter, chapter 5, will have sexually explicit contents. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip and rejoin us next weekend for chapter 6.** Also, I _swear_ that it’s not going to continue being NSFW every other chapter forever.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	7. He and Me and Me (Explicit)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**
> 
> __  
> **This chapter has sexually explicit contents. If that is not to your taste, feel free to skip and rejoin us with chapter 7.**  
> 

_He and Me and Me_

Vimes, to his regret and chagrin, didn’t have normal weeks. But from a martial standpoint, if he did, he might bed Sybil twice in a week, if that was her fancy, and he might bed Nick once. It wasn’t that he wanted Nick any less. It was simply that he was one man, even if between his wife’s dietary interventions and the simple fact that he did a lot of running, Vimes’s heart seemed to be doing a very reasonable job of pumping blood for a man his age. Sybil, delicate as she could be, had martial appetites.

Nick, as far as Vimes could tell, didn’t. He liked sex. He’d even initiate it. But Nick seemed as happy with a smoky jazz bar, with solving a cold case, with returning a lost confused elderly relative to a grateful family, as he was with sex. He didn’t get irritable if he had a dry week. Vimes didn’t think he’d ever seen Nick wank off.

But now there were two Nicks, and one was human. Vimes had not yet had the courage to ask the human Nick if he had a sex drive. With Sybil and one Nick, Vimes had the constant creeping dread that he was failing both of his spouses. With Sybil and two Nicks, Vimes _knew_ he was failing them. They were just too polite to complain, he assumed gloomily.

Vimes was trying to be properly affectionate with everyone. He suspected that he was going to be worn out in short order. It was three months before the wizards could put Nick back together? 

Now it was his day with Valentine and he actually had both of them in their bedroom and he felt like he could manage something aside from just sleep. He started to say, “So, about that thr-”

“Okay!” said the human Valentine, putting the file folder he’d been looking at on his nightstand and looking at Vimes eagerly.

“Eh. Sure,” said the synth, rubbing his temples.

Vimes wrapped his arm around the synth and tilted his chin down to look at him better. “If you don’t feel up to it -”

“I appreciate that, sweetheart, but I think I can manage,” said the synth, his smile like a crack of light from between the clouds.

Vimes kissed him.

“What were you thinking?” the human Nick asked, sitting up straighter.

Vimes broke off the kiss reluctantly and mumbled, “I don’t know why you assume I’ve put any _thought_ into this.” Embarrassing fantasies? Oh yes. Thought? No.

“It ain’t like I’ve ever had a threesome, doll,” the synth drawled.

“Me either!” Vimes protested. _But I’m the one who wants one, so..._ The human Nick was definitely looking at Vimes expectantly for direction. “Erm. What if I went down on… you,” he looked at the synth Nick, “...and if you’d, uhm, see to my back door?” He looked semi-frantically over at the human Nick.

“Oh sweetheart, I’d love to!” enthused the human Nick.

The synth looked amused. “What, y’wanna be spitroasted?”

“It happens enough to have a name, and that’s what it’s called?” Vimes sputtered.

“Read it and weep,” said the synth, flipping their book of sex positions to the hithero unused section on threesomes, “or drool, whatever.”

“Why is it called spitroasting?” Vimes complained, frowning.

“Dunno, why do you call giving a blowjob bagpiping?” the human Nick asked playfully.

“Because that’s what it’s called!” Vimes snapped, and he crossed his arms, sulking.

The human Nick snuggled up behind Vimes and wrapped his arms around Vimes’s waist. He rubbed Vimes’s cock, fondled his balls, and licked the back of his neck. Vimes couldn’t stay grumpy.

“Now your mouth’s gonna be, uh, occupied, so thumbs down for ‘stop’?” the synth inquired, stroking Vimes’s face.

Vimes gave him a thumbs up and dove right in. He loved sucking Nick off. The best thing about it was, of course, how good Vimes could make Nick feel, but the second best thing about servicing the synth was ease of cleanup. No jizz to worry about gagging on, even if they didn’t use a sonky! Vimes had now been a husband to Nick long enough to realize that, while this was indeed the second best thing about giving him gamahuche, that he ought not mention it as a feature.

Hellfire, but he did love to feel Nick stiffen against his tongue.

The human Valentine did have jissom, but with where he was and what Vimes had asked him to do, the cleanup was really about the same, sonky or no sonky. He fingered Vimes while stroking his cock and balls. Vimes sort of felt that distraction made the quality of the head he was giving the synth suffer a little, as if he was curled up in 69 with just one of them, but the synth wasn’t complaining. He kept his synthflesh hand around the back of Vimes’s head, occasionally giving him a nudge.

Yes, all the attention on him was very distracting, indeed. It was glorious.

Then the human Nick was in him. Vimes had to pause a moment and take his mouth off the synth to catch his breath, though he kept one hand on his shaft and the other around his hips.

“You okay there, doll?” the synth asked, tenderly running his fingers along the line of Vimes’s jaw.

Vimes panted, “Just give me a, _oh_ , moment, dear.”

Nick obligingly waited for him, while the other Nick built up steam. Vimes took the synth back in his mouth and resolved to finish him off before the human Nick had him too occupied for hand-eye-mouth coordination. He accomplished that goal a few minutes later and relished the look of delight and release on his Nick’s face. Job done, he laid his head down on Nick’s lap and let Nick ruffle his fingers through his hair and trace the curve of his ears while the other Nick quite thoroughly filled Vimes.

Not long after that, Vimes came, that intense and diffuse sensation that came of being deeply, properly rogered, and Nick came just after him.

They lay together in a sweat-sticky cuddling pile of whining fans and laboured breath. Vimes sighed contently. “Gods. No, not the gods, they didn’t do anything. My Nicks. My…” he hesitated. The physicality was easy; words of affection were not, but his Nicks were so very dear to him, “My… angels. Mmm. Thank you. For humoring me.”

“Any time,” the human Nick offered, giving him a squeeze.

“Glad you enjoyed it. Angels? Heh,” said the synth, kissing the top of his head.

“You spoke of angels, from the first,” Vimes mumbled. Nick had. Golems did that sort of thing, speaking of angels.

The synth looked thoughtfully over at the human Nick. “Yeah. Of vengeance.”

The still-livid scar on Vimes’s wrist twinged with pain. He didn’t deserve them, but if he did, they’d be the kind he deserved. “Ye-es. My angels. Just my sort.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** Trying to split all of one’s time exactly evenly between one’s partners is probably not the healthiest take on polyamory, but Vimes doesn’t know what he’s doing.
> 
> Vimes also doesn’t know what he’s invoking.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	8. Barking Terms * What He Was * Explanations * Humanocentrism

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [7 Days to the Wolves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKeL83LFUSo&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=7) by Nightwish.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Barking Terms * What He Was * Explanations * Humanocentrism_

Angua was not on speaking terms with her parents. She wasn’t even on snarling terms, However, before her mother had married her father, she had been Mme. Serafine Soxe-Bloonberg of Genua. Angua had a third cousin by marriage in Ankh-Morpork, but Carlotta didn’t count. Angua still had family in Genua. The only reason why she was still on speaking terms with them was that she didn’t speak with them much. Genua didn’t have many werewolf families, not like Uberwald where werewolves were native, and the witches of Genua kept the werewolves there in line. Angua’s people were people who needed to be kept in line.

Angua had taken some of her vacation time - she had a lot, and she’d hardly ever touched it before - hopped the train to Genua, and met up with some of her mother’s family. She played it off and said it was simply because the line out to Genua made it so easy, but Angua did not do things on a whim.

Mr. Vimes’s well-meaning but ultimately tonedeaf exhortation to Carrot to, “Get married already!” (complete with blue garter) rattled about in Angua’s head in the quiet times when all _was_ well. She’d shouted back, “Raise my salary!” and made a joke of it. Young dwarfs were expected to buy each other off their parents when they wished to marry.

Truth was, Angua had already saved enough to buy Carrot, although he would be expensive, being the son of a chief mining engineer. But a wedding would make it final, and there’d be certain… expectations, and no one could really understand but another werewolf, and while there were other werewolves in Ankh-Morpork, to them, she was Captain Angua von Uberwald, celebrated werewolf community leader.

There’d been nothing for it but talking to family, even family she had never met. 

Karlene Soxe-Bloonberg was a cousin of Angua and a yennork, a werewolf where the switch to change forms was broken. Karlene always looked human, like Angua’s harmless sister Elsa had, but Karlene wasn’t harmless. The witches in Genua prevented the werewolves from culling the yennorks out of their family trees the way werewolves did in their native Uberwald, but sparing Karlene might have been a mistake. She had a human’s sharp mind and a wolf’s viciousness with none of the pack loyalty.

But she was about Angua’s age, so they’d talked.

“It’s just, he’ll want children,” Angua sighed, running her fingers through her hair as they walked past bakeries scented of powdered sugar and cinnamon beignets. She’d never actually discussed it with Carrot, but she assumed that he would.

“So?” Karlene said bluntly.

“So the… children might turn out…” Angua said hesitantly. ‘Children’ was a loose word to apply to young werewolves, where ‘pup’ was often more appropriate.

“Like me?” Karlene asked, smile unpleasant, for all that she’d never be able to manage fangs like Angua.

“No, of course not, I don’t mean -” Angua started, but she did mean. Yennorks weren’t human, but they looked human, and if they married humans, that was how one ended up with humans with a bit of wolf about them, and Carrot was a born king. She didn’t think he’d ever take the crown; he listened too much to Mr. Vimes. But one of his children or grandchildren might someday, and if his children or grandchildren were also Angua’s children and grandchildren, then they might have a bit of monster about them. Ankh-Morpork had already had an entirely human king, Lorenzo the Kind, who had been a monster. Angua didn’t need to make the future worse than the past.

“You do mean,” said Karlene, viciously delighted to have caught her cousin out. “But you speak of what he wants. What do you want?”

Angua knew she’d follow what Carrot wanted, and that was also a problem. 

Karlene heard what the silence was speaking. “Gods. You don’t have to be such a dog, cousin.”

“How am I supposed to be anything else?” Angua snapped.

“That’s rich, you’re asking a yennork how to be something else,” Karlene sniffed. “But it’s not hard. Gods, you could just tell your human that you’ll adopt.”

The line of kings seemed something too big to break.

But Angua thought about it. She had the beignets. She did the perfunctory family requirements of sniffing the appropriate aunts, uncles, and cousins. Then she caught the train back to Ankh-Morpork.

Angua went back to her locker at Pseudopolis Yard and donned her uniform, though this night was the full moon, so she’d soon be out of the uniform, anyway. She frowned faintly as she sniffed the air in the locker room. Then she checked in with Mr. Vimes. He must have been seeing that she was eyeing him strangely, because he immediately explained, “Angua! I’m glad you’re back. You missed that Nick ended up split into two people, magic accident, you know, and one’s human. You must be smelling the second Nick on me.”

Human?

* * *

Valentine found out what he really was at the full moon, when a snarling blonde ‘wolfhound’ with a badge on her collar took him down before he could do anything he would have regretted.

He had been damned close to doing something he would have regretted.

Why, again, had the Institute given him such a good sense of smell?

* * *

It was so late that it was early, falling just shy of actually being morning, when a knock came on Nick’s window. Nick glanced up from his reading and frowned. He considered dismissing the matter, but the possibility that one of the dragons had escaped or that someone had set off a trap led him to get up and investigate. There was a second knock before he reached the window. He peered out and… there he was, or rather, there the organic version of himself was. Without his clothes. The phrase ‘naked as the day he was born’ came to mind, but was immediately dismissed, because, of course, neither Nick was ever born.

The organic Nick gestured for the synthetic Nick to open the window, and the synthetic Nick complied. 

“I would comment that this explains where you’ve been all night, but it really doesn’t,” synthetic Nick observed dryly. “Care to enlighten me? And where the hell are your clothes?”

“Wish I knew!” snarled the other Nick, and… wow, his teeth were sharp. Had they been that sharp before? The synthetic Nick automatically ran his tongue over the tips of his metal teeth. “Most of the night’s a blur, but I do know that I got damned close to killing someone!”

Synth Nick’s optics widened. “What?! What’s going on?” Nick didn’t see himself as the sort who could accidentally kill someone while on a bender, but with his organic side showing up _naked_ after being out all night, talking about not remembering what happened… He sniffed. “You don’t _smell_ drunk-”

The other Nick laughed bitterly. “You don’t even begin to understand smell…” He took a deep breath and frowned thoughtfully. “Sam was in here earlier, wasn’t he?” Then he tilted his head in a move that was almost… dog-like. “Did you know he smells… blue?”

“I don’t think he was depre-” Nick began.

“No, no,” interrupted the other Nick. “His scent. It’s like… it’s dark blue. Navy?” Then he shook his head, only the movement seemed to involve more than just his head, as though he were trying to shake rain off him, and threw himself down into his chair. “Not the point,” he barked. “The point is, those blasted wizards examined our _morphic fields_ and somehow missed the fact that I’m a _werewolf!”_ By the end he was shouting. “How do you miss something like that!”

Synth Nick’s optics widened once more. “You’re a…” Then he glanced outside. The moon had already gone down, but much of Watch tended to keep track of its phases because it gave clues as to how careful one needed to be around Captain Angua. Then he looked back at his other self. “You didn’t, uh…”

“No, I didn’t hurt anyone,” snarled huma- no, werewolf Nick. “Captain Angua stopped me.”

“Not that,” Synth Nick cleared his throat. “I mean, since we got split, when you were with Sam, you haven’t, erm…”

The werewolf frowned at the question, then opened his eyes in realization. “Oh!” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t… not that I wasn’t tempted, but we were still getting used to things…”

The synth looked relieved. “Thank God. Probably the last thing anyone on this Disc needs is a werewolf Commander Vimes.”

* * *

After some time, the werewolf Valentine started to explain to the synth, “It happened something like this…”

_It wasn’t a night with his husband, and while he could have used the sleep, he’d gone wandering, as he often did. Night was his time. When the clamor of the street vendors died down to a soft roar, jazz music would waft on the night aromas, curling around the nose like creeping ivy tendrils on old architectural facades. This night, though, it was as if there was a pull on him, as if the turning of the calendar pages had a power of their own, dragging him towards some inexorable conclusion._

_Ankh-Morpork tended towards clouded skies; the sun didn’t want to see the city in all its depravity and glory, but tonight, as the sun died on the horizon, the sky was clear, and the moon rose._

_Valentine turned inside out on himself, telescoping into and out of two completely different phase-shapes that were nonetheless entirely him._

_Being human - he thought he’d been human - had been rough. Lungs. Moist, humid air, laden with life, in and out. A heart, not neon, not pink, not glowing. Red muscle, bathed in blood._

_Blood._

_He had legs. Four of them. No arms. The entire way that this body moved was fundamentally different. Behind him, a tail wagged. His nose lifted to the night air, and greyscale exploded in a thousand colours, each of them with a name all their own in a language he didn’t have the tongue to speak._

_Blood._

_Nick Valentine wanted blood. Ankh-Morpork did not want for it. It was splashed on the cobbles. Old blood. New blood. Blue blood. Silicon blood dizzying with sparks. But on four feet, quiet on the cobbles, almost soundless, he sought specific blood. Dear blood. There was no thought to it. It was just the area of town he was in. Who he knew here._

_Piper and Nat in their tiny postage-stamp apartment._

_Paws were no good for picking locks. But he might have been able to tear the door off its hinges. His jaws closed on the door handle, the metal a tang against his tongue._

_A snarling blonde wolfhound knocked him down and they tumbled down the crumbling, mossy stairs and to the cobbles, where her jaws found the scruff of his neck and her paws held him down. If he’d had more conscious thought available, Valentine would have thought that she seemed practiced in takedowns._

_Her snarling muzzle made something that he heard as speech, and she said, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Constable Valentine?”_

_And that was his name, wasn’t it? It was a funny name to put to an animal that ran on four legs through a world of scent. His tongue was not made for speech nor his teeth, he was sure, and he tripped over himself as he mumbled, “...hrmeph?”_

_She dragged him off into an alley, and the scent of the rubbish bins, ripe for rubbish collection by King’s boys, gently wafted over them. It was a sort of pale green, he thought. She demanded again, “What were you doing? Because that looked an awful lot like attempted breaking and entering, there. What kind of idiot are you? Can’t you tell a vampire’s been there?”_

_A vampire?_

_Piper was dating Captain Sally. Piper. Valentine had wanted to find Piper and…_

_“Oh my God.”_

_“Gods generally aren’t helpful about this sort of thing, I’ve found,” the blonde wolfhound sniffed._

_They couldn’t actually be speaking, could they? Everyone knew canines couldn’t speak. But he knew that voice. Valentine hazarded, “Captain Angua?”_

_“No shit, Valentine,” Angua said._

_“I’m a wolf?” Valentine said numbly, as the shock drained from him._

_“Brilliant deduction. But no. You’re a werewolf. You’re not either. You’re both. Always,” Angua said grimly. Then she sniffed him. “And I’m not sure you’re even entirely wolf now. Some Brindisian wolf, some Howondaland golden wolf, but hmm… I don’t know. You just smell a bit… fey, that’s all. Maybe it’s your aftershave?”_

_Both and neither, always, was about the story of his life. But a werewolf? Valentine wasn’t human. It was almost a relief. He felt a bit more himself, if that was the case. What did people say about werewolves? They pass themselves off as human, but as soon as a chicken or, worse, a child goes missing, who gets blamed?_

_Huh. It was almost like what people said about synths._

_“Let’s get you out of the moonlight. That’s the first thing - if you’re anything like the same sort of lycanthrope I am, and you smell like you are - when you’re in moonlight, you have to change,” Angua lectured._

_It turned out that Angua and Carrot had a small apartment on Elm Street, with a generous dog door. Angua turned to Valentine and said severely, “Stay.”_

_Then she vanished off into her apartment and returned as a fully dressed humanoid. She must have been a quick dresser. She threw what must have been a set of Carrot’s clothing at him and turned her back on him, tapping one of her feet._

_Valentine nosed at the clothing. It smelled very clean, like soap. He sat back on his hind legs and made a questioning noise._

_“Get changed,” Angua said bluntly._

_She made it sound so easy, like flipping a switch. Valentine reared up on his hind legs. So he was supposed to, what… retract his claws, retract all the hair…?_

_Angua waited._

_Valentine fell over. He tried scratching behind his ear. That did not appear to be how the werewolf factory reset worked. He needed to get back up on two legs and not have a dangling tail and…_

_Eventually, something went ‘click’, and Valentine was sprawled out on the floor next to Angua’s boot rack. He put on the clothing, which was too big for him, and he said, “I’m decent now, Captain.”_

_“Doubtful,” said Angua, turning around, “But that’s going to be a problem you’ll run into, Valentine. Not having any clothes. I recommend having caches around the city, although people do steal them. Now I’ve got a very important question for you, Valentine. Have you bitten Mr. Vimes?”_

_“What? No. We’re not like that,” Valentine sputtered. But he’d wanted to, hadn’t he? When they’d lain together. He’d wanted to taste that dear blood, to roll it over his tongue. A wave of self-revulsion hit him._

_“Good,” Angua said stonily. “See that you don’t. Now, what were you doing?”_

_“I don’t know,” Valentine mumbled, but he did._

_Angua narrowed her eyes. “I think you do. There’s… a lot, to this. Too much to explain now. Too much for a lifetime. I’ll take you around another day to meet the… community. For now, keep your tail out of trouble. And whatever you do, don’t bite Mr. Vimes.” She turned her back on him again. “You can leave Carrot’s clothes there. I’ll put them away.”_

* * *

The werewolf Valentine knocked on the door of Vimes and Sybil’s bedroom, the synth Valentine behind him. Vimes answered the door in a hastily thrown-on nightgown, Sybil still sprawled out drowsing on the big master bed that Vimes and Sybil shared. Vimes asked, “What’s the matter, Nick?”

“I’m not human,” the werewolf Valentine started.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a Courser,” Vimes offered.

Valentine pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not a Courser, Sam. I’m a werewolf.”

“Oh,” Vimes said weakly. “I think I should wake up Sybil and that we should all sit down.”

They did.

“Uhm, look, I’ve heard about that business where you killed some werewolves barehanded -” the werewolf Valentine started.

“The barehanded ones were in self-defense, and I’m frankly not sure they stayed down. Wolfgang… Wolfgang was resisting arrest,” Vimes said, and he looked troubled. “I don’t have a problem with werewolves in general per se. I’m quite fond of Captain Angua. She’s a model officer.”

“Yes, she’s a lovely young lady,” Sybil said.

The werewolf Valentine did have to admit that he’d worried. A guy heard stories about Vimes. 

Then Vimes added brightly, rubbing his chin, “Actually, getting another werewolf in the Watch is a bargain, really, if your nose is half as good as Angua’s. Is it?”

“Uh, I really wouldn’t know, Sam,” the werewolf Valentine confessed, feeling rather inadequate. He hunched his shoulders up. “The main thing the Captain said is that I shouldn’t bite you.”

Vimes blinked and said slowly, “Oh. Yes. Don’t. Really, don’t bite anyone, if you can avoid it. It shouldn’t be necessary with your current assignment.”

“Not even if the schoolkids say ‘bite me’,” said the synth Valentine, smiling crookedly.

Well, if he couldn’t laugh at himself, who could?

* * *

“You called ‘dibsies’ on my brother and then missed that he is a werewolf. Sir,” said DiMA politely, “I must inform you that this is another example of humanocentrism in academia leading to inaccurate conclusions.”

Ponder sighed, “Look, the silver shavings for the second order morphic field chain reaction analysis are expensive, and it hardly ever comes up. I didn’t think it was worth checking, but now that we know that he’s a werewolf, this opens up a fascinating new avenue of study.”

Which was why Nick, Nick, DiMA, and Alf were all standing in neatly chalked ritual circles as Ponder fiddled with an experimental apparatus that consisted of entirely too many odd spiral pieces of glasswork. “Alf is native to the Disc and is human - you are human, aren’t you, Alf? You’re not a vampire or a werewolf or something?”

“I’m human, sir. Last I checked, anyway,” said Alf readily.

“Nick Valentine-Vimes the synth is a synth from the Commonwealth, Nick Valentine-Vimes the werewolf is a werewolf with a morphic field native to the Disc, and DiMA is a synth from the Commonwealth. If I run a Varthan’s third order analysis backwards, I should be able to determine what DiMA would be if he was native to the Disc -” started Ponder.

“Wouldn’t I be a werewolf, sir? My brother is a werewolf,” said DiMA.

“Hmm, I dunno, DiMA,” said Alf.

“It would kind of explain the blackouts and the skeletons in the closet,” the synth Nick mused.

DiMA fixed a look on Nick and reminded, “I didn’t actually do that.”

“But you would have, and you know it,” the werewolf Nick replied casually.

“- and I will be able to determine what Alf would have been in the Commonwealth. I’ll be able to make accurate speculative predictions about alternative versions of people in different dimensions! Imagine, there might be a reality where we all live on a big metal ring, floating in the void of space, embroiled in complicated political subterfuge…” concluded Ponder, unflagged by the interruptions.

Ponder did some things with the complicated glass spirals, and Nick was forced to assume that they sure were magic, because DiMA and Alf were both pretending assiduously like they understood what Ponder was doing. To Nick the werewolf, there was an odd sort of smell as Ponder did… stuff. It was like the memory of green and purple and yellow, all jumbled up.

Eventually, Ponder said, “Oh. Huh. That’s… interesting… and… more than a little horrifying, but it explains a few things, it really does.” He took a few steps back, so that he was standing farther away from DiMA and closer to Alf. “Alf! In the Commonwealth, you would be human. Probably an Institute scientist, if these projections are correct, but maybe a really wishy-washy one, you know, who just studies tato crop yields and not anything like turning humans into super-mutants.”

“Aw,” said Alf, and Nick couldn’t tell if Alf was disappointed that he’d be an Institute scientist or disappointed that he would only be studying tatos and not committing egregious ethics breaches.

“And… DiMA. Uhm. You would, no offense, be one of the… Fair Folk. The, uhm, Lords and Ladies. You know, like the one that showed up at his wedding,” and Ponder looked over at Nick, “and then the Patrician had hung by the neck until dead. And then all the departments bickered over who had the rights to the corpse, because a clearly magical corpse like that clearly belonged at the Unseen University, and that conniving Dr. Hix got it.” Ponder made a frustrated noise. “I could have done so much Inadvisably Applied Magic with the corpse of one of the Fair Folk.”

Nick knew enough to know that being compared to one of the Fair Folk was very much an insult. He’d personally punched out the now-dead elf that Ponder was referring to. A stainless steel hand did a number on elves, it turned out.

DiMA looked thoughtful and admitted, “That would explain a number of things, indeed, sir. However, if Nick is a werewolf, and I would have been one of the Fair Folk...”

“Oh, that,” said Alf dismissively. “Well, humans and Fair Folk can have children, right? There’s that halfblood bartender, Mankin, at the Octarine Parrot. And everyone knows humans and werewolves can have children. So I imagine the Fair Folk and werewolves ought to be able to have children, as well, and DiMA came out elfier, and Nick came out woofier. Just stands to reason.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S** : You can imagine wolf-mode Nick looks like a combination of an [Italian Wolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_wolf) and an [African Golden Wolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_golden_wolf).
> 
> **A:** Angua and Carrot's romantic subplot feels like it was leading up to a wedding. The Art of Discworld, which has notes by Terry Pratchett, even talks about a marriage. The series just never goes there, although the series does have Carrot and Angua move in together. So I do enjoy exploring a bit more of the Angua/Carrot romance.
> 
> It's mentioned that Angua's mother (er, dam) is from Genua, which implies all sorts of interesting things about Genua.
> 
> The end of the series mentions that the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway was laying track to Genua; this fic assumes that line has been completed and is now operational.
> 
> There are a lot of good fics that explore Nick Valentine as either a Gen 3 synth or a human. We wanted to do something a bit different and explore Nick Valentine as something that is organic but still very much Other. Also, Discworld genre conventions already associate werewolves and noir detectives.
> 
> In the Science of Discworld series, the Unseen University Faculty, Ponder included, fight quite a few elves. 
> 
> Meanwhile: Alf is apparently writing fanfiction about his friends.
> 
> **S:** Incidentally: yes, Ponder did invent a method of determine any given character’s persona for any given alternate reality. For example, Alf’s Fallout-sona is clearly an Institute tato scientist.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	9. Probably Meatloaf * Bucket * Walksies * In Loco Parentis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [A Dog's Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfvYHUWuq9k&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=8) by Miracle Of Sound.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Probably Meatloaf * Bucket * Walksies * In Loco Parentis_

On his off day from school, Valentine dropped by Sergeant Cheery’s alchemy laboratory in Pseudopolis Yard. She asked circumspectly, “Haven’t you been down by Cable Street?”

She was a Sergeant, maybe a lab-jockey Sergeant, but a Sergeant nonetheless, and she wouldn’t be worth her stripes if she didn’t know some of the best Watch gossip. Ninety percent of magic was just knowing one extra fact, DiMA had said, and Valentine thought his brother was quoting someone there. He wished he knew who.

“Something like, Sarge. I wanted to ask a favour. You got a sample of Crystal Slam I could sniff?” said Valentine.

Her little eyebrowless worried dwarfish expression turned scandalized, “Valentine, it doesn’t work on humans, not as, uhm, intended, anyway, and besides, you don’t sniff it -”

“‘M not human, Sarge,” said Valentine, carefully offering her up what would soon be a very interesting piece of Watch gossip, and she’d have it first… well, after Captain Angua, his other self, and Commander Vimes. Cheery would have it fourth. That had to count for something. “I’m a werewolf, and a little bluebird says some troll kids in Sunink died of Crystal Slam overdose.”

Her worried and scandalized expression became only moreso, and Cheery hissed out, “Valentine, don’t say that so loudly!”

“What?” asked Valentine, looking around her laboratory curiously. She had more interesting glassware than DiMA’s head, and that was saying something.

“That you’re, uhm, of the lunar persuasion. Someone might hear,” Cheery scolded.

“Someone might hear? Nah, someone’s gonna hear. That’s inevitable. You’re hearing right now. I’d open a betting pool with Nobby about who’s gonna hear first, only that’d ruin the whole point of it,” Valentine said lightly.

“You can’t go around telling people you’re a werewolf!” Cheery insisted.

“Why not?” Valentine asked.

“Look, some of my best friends are werewolves, nothing against them, but you know how people hold… biases,” Cheery said carefully.

“Do I,” Valentine said dryly. “Look, it’s my tail, and I think honesty’s the best policy. Unless lying will avoid a five-way crossbow shootout. Then lying’s definitely the way to go.”

Cheery sighed. “You don’t get it. It’s not just your funeral you’re talking about. If you make friends with the wrong end of a firework, Mister Vimes will go nuclear. But anyway… I’ve a sample of Crystal Slam that Sergeant Detritus pried out of one of the ramshackle cookeries downstream on the Ankh.” She went through the evidence bin and held it up.

It was a little white powder, no bigger than his little finger, in a bag. He sniffed it. It smelled bad, in a chemical sort of way, a different sort of chemical way than Sybil’s cakes smelled when she cooked them over sulphurous dragonflame, but he didn’t know that he could tell it apart from anything in specific. Valentine sagged. Vimes had wondered if he was half as good as Angua. He didn’t think he was. “Smells were so much clearer when I was a wolf last night…”

Cheery coughed politely, “I’ll look away if you’d like to change.”

Valentine smiled, tongue flicking over one too-sharp canine tooth. “You’re a peach, Sarge.”

He changed.

Cheery’s cosy little laboratory was a riot of a thousand clamoring and self-contradictory smells, lighting up in colours he didn’t think were legally allowed to exist. How was blue allowed to be darker than black!? Valentine swooned and nearly passed out on her floor.

Cheery turned back around, regarded the vertiginous wolf on her floor, and murmured, “I’d try the smelling salts, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. Just take a moment. You’ll get used to it. Or throw up. One of the two. You haven’t had a meal recently, have you?”

Valentine whimpered on her floor, paws over his head, but her floor really wasn’t much better than anything else, the floor being where all the assorted drips and drabs from spilled solutions inevitably went. He tried to breathe in and out from his mouth to avoid his nose entirely, but that didn’t seem to work. His nose burned. It was like how, when he’d been a synth, his geiger counter would scream like nails on a chalkboard in the Nucleus, the radiation-haunted home of the Children of Atom, only a thousand times worse.

Eventually, he gathered up enough tolerance to sniff the packet of Crystal Slam. It sparkled, somehow, harsh and acrid, like neon, like the twinkling of casino lights, promising of risk and reward.

“Got it?” asked Cheery.

He nodded.

She rummaged through the evidence locker and pulled out a different packet. “This is Slunkie.”

Slunkie didn’t sparkle like Crystal Slam did, but there were definite similar notes of piquant radium.

Cheery took him on a tour of Scrape, Slab, Sleek, Slice, Slide, Sliver, Slump, Slurp, and

Honk. Then she pulled out a blue bottle labelled ‘KC2’. That one didn’t make a tingling cloud around itself. It just burned. Cheery explained, “Potassium carbide. Trolls use it as perfume. There’s no radionuclides in it. It’s mostly harmless, though opinions differ. I think the Mouldavians have tried to classify it as a chemical weapon. Trolls sometimes try to use it to cover up the scent of cooking drugs, too, but you can’t cover up the scent of cooking Crystal Slam. It’s… unforgettable, though you definitely want to.”

Cooking Crystal Slam had a specific smell? Valentine was definitely interested in that. He whined in his best approximation of a dog begging.

“I get what you’re saying,” Cheery said evenly, “but I’m not cooking up a sample of Crystal Slam just so you can learn what that smells like.”

Valentine rolled over and whimpered.

“I mean, maybe there’s a half-cooked sample in the evidence locker, that’s not like actually cooking Crystal Slam, that’s just… educational. But you’re going to regret this lesson. Get changed and come back in 15,” Cheery directed.

Valentine did. He went down to the canteen. He hadn’t been there in what felt like forever, even though it had only been a week. The canteen had _avec_ , courtesy of a Quirmian exchange Captain who’d gone through as a part of the exchange program, and Valentine was now in a form that could actually appreciate _avec_!

Despite the allure of the _avec_ , Valentine helped himself to the probably-meatloaf, which was probably meat, passing up the fancy salad with the curly green-yellow-purple leaves and the cheese made from the milk of the Nothingfjord reindeer. In any case, the scent of probably-meat made him drool. Getting used to eating was certainly a trip! He sat down with his tray, with the uncomfortable knowledge that, in some metaphysical sense, he was wagging. 

Captain Angua sat down across from him, took away his tray with the meatloaf, and replaced it with a spectacularly uninteresting salad. This one was just green, no purple, no curly leaves, no reindeer cheese. The metaphysical wagging stopped, and Valentine pouted at her. Well, to be perfectly honest, he _whined_ like Dogmeat when he was denied table-scraps.

Angua said coolly, “You do seem to be a decent man, Constable Valentine, but I would hate to see you become a humanitarian.”

Valentine picked at the salad distrustfully. “And what, avoiding meat helps?”

“A little,” she said wistfully, picking at her own salad.

Valentine said carefully, “Ponder said that this is who I would have been, if I had been… native to Discworld.”

Angua snorted. “Then you probably wouldn’t be a Constable Valentine.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’d probably be a, oh… Nikolaus Berthold Ketterer von Valentinstag, and I don’t think, Constable Valentine, you’d be nearly as decent a man as you are right now.”

“Oh?” Valentine asked, intrigued. It was a little hard to go lower than ‘walking ethics violation and abomination of science’.

“No,” Angua said, with certainty. “You’d have been born knowing that you were better than everyone else, that the world was your prey to toy with.”

Valentine ate his salad and wished he had that meatloaf back.

Angua stood and leaned over the table, looming over him, and she murmured, very lowly, “And if you start thinking like that, for one moment, I will personally put you down.”

Valentine looked up and said sincerely, “I appreciate it.”

* * *

Angua later told herself that she shouldn’t have worried, as she watched that fool casually pick up Cheery’s silver alembic and then drop it with a yelp, wondering why he’d been burned.

“Hey, I needed that!” Cheery protested, over the dropped alembic.

Angua did not raise finger one to hand it to Cheery. Valentine started to reach out. Then he stopped. He’d learned. Good boy.

Cheery picked up her own alembic and asided to Angua, “He wants to smell what cooking Crystal Slam smells like.” She shook her head sadly.

Angua drawled, “Valentine, do you _want_ to die? I’m just checking.”

“C’mon, Captain, this is important! Besides, I’m human right now,” Valentine protested.

“You’re not human,” Angua corrected. Never human. Sometimes human enough for government work, but then only barely. “And you’re just out of a change. In the period after a change, your senses are just as sharp as they are when you’re a wolf, only your brain ought to also be thinking. Ought to be, I say, because it looks like you’re contemplating Suicide.”

“Oh,” said Valentine, blinking.

It wasn’t quite fair. Valentine didn’t know any of this. He had no reason to know any of this. He hadn’t grown up needing to fight back just how good blood smelled when spilled on fresh snow. He hadn’t grown up at all. Lucky bastard.

But it was too late. Cheery had on something like a yellow Knockerman’s outfit crossed with a plague doctor’s costume, and she gingerly dropped a blue powder into the popping hot vessel sitting on her hot plate.

Angua hadn’t changed recently. It still smelled horrible to her, like something unspeakable had been done to month-old rotten eggs. Valentine hit the floor in a swoon, a little drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. Angua observed dryly, “That’s one way to knock the boys dead, Cheery.”

* * *

Finding Angua at a time when both she and Vimes were off-duty and not otherwise occupied was difficult. For one thing, the little time that a cop had off was damned near sacred. What he wanted to ask her had very little to do with being a copper, though. Vimes found her at the Bucket, nursing a pint of Winkles. He got himself a Cheery Cola and sat down across from her at her booth.

“Mister Vimes,” she greeted, looking over her beer at him.

“I wouldn’t trouble you with this, it’s not work and you’re off duty, besides, but I’m just not quite sure who to ask,” Vimes started, hoping he appeared appropriately contrite.

Angua raised an eloquent eyebrow.

“It’s about Nick, you see,” he continued in a hushed tone.

“Has he bit you?” she asked flatly.

“No!” Vimes snapped, blushing. “We’re not like that. It’s just, I had to check about, er,” he played with his collar, “What about other contact and fluids?”

Angua laughed despite herself, and then she asked soberly, “Have you drank the water out of his pawprint?”

“What? No, that’s daft,” Vimes said.

“Well, don’t, because depending on what variety he is, that can do it,” Angua said.

“Yes, but what about, uhm, martial duties? Can I get in trouble with marital duties?” Vimes asked worriedly.

“Probably not, unless you’re into wolfskin belts or magic salves or skinny dipping in enchanted streams,” Angua said coolly. “Just don’t let him bite you, Mister Vimes. Might want to invest in a muzzle.”

* * *

On the list of weird things in Valentine’s life, which was a very long list, he hadn’t expected to add ‘needing to take himself for walkies’, and yet, there he was. His other self had asked to be walked, because he still wasn’t entirely comfortable being a wolf by himself, and he wanted to get used to it with someone around who’d tell him ‘Bad dog!’ if he went for someone’s jugular. It was an uncomfortable thought.

Valentine concentrated rather hard on a different weird thought: that the Pope would appear before him and declare a new revelation, directly from God: that queer polyamorous marriages were, in fact, totally fine and, moreover, that Blind Io, who wasn’t a heathen god but was, in fact, really just some sort of saint, also approved.

Disappointingly, that did not happen.

Valentine complained to himself, as they walked together, synthetic man and scruffy grey ‘wolfhound’, “Do you really have to stop and sniff _everything_?”

The wolf looked up at him and gave him a look that said without words ‘you know you’d do the same thing if you were in my place,’ and Valentine had to admit that that was true.

* * *

The regular card games hosted by the Vimeses continued, even if there were now twice the Nicks to attend them. Usually they played either poker or Cripple Mister Onion, but since Cripple Mister Onion, with its double-sized deck5, lent itself a bit better to larger groups, the group now mostly stuck with that on account of their temporary extra member. 

Deacon was dealing, having won the previous round. No one, including the werewolf Nick, had been able to figure out what sort of fast one the former spy had pulled, so he’d gotten away with it. It was, in fact, entirely possible that Deacon had managed to win fairly, but that was unlikely. To Deacon’s left was Piper, then Valentine’s synth self, then Sybil, Sam, and finally the werewolf Nick himself. He’d already figured out he couldn’t make the sort of calculations he used to be able to do, so while he watched Deacon carefully while the other man shuffled, he focused on his face rather than his hands. 

The night wasn’t going well for Valentine. His other self kept calling his bluffs, so he got revenge by calling the synth’s bluffs. Besides that, he was distracted by Piper’s presence, even though he had intentionally picked a seat as far from her as he could get. He _knew_ some of the others had noticed some of his guilty glances. As much as he loved little Nat, he was glad she was in another room where she, along with Young Sam, Shaun, and Deacon’s newly adopted daughter, played under Willikins’s watchful eye. Codsworth, meanwhile, was in the room with the card players, serving drinks. 

Deacon began dealing out cards to everyone. Valentine knew he loved being dealer; the dealer got to keep all their cards face-down, while everyone else had to show half of their own cards. As he dealt the face-down ones, Piper peeked at hers and observed, casually, “Y’know, I _still_ find it hard to believe that _you_ , of all people, adopted a kid.” She discarded four cards, which Deacon promptly replaced. 

As Valentine’s synth self discarded one card, Deacon shrugged and replaced it. “Actually, I kidnapped her,” he explained, “but her parents won’t take her back unless _I_ pay _them_ ransom, so to save face I came up with this whole adoption cover.”

While Sybil discarded two cards, Vimes narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “We had a case like that a few years back, actually,” he observed, looking at Deacon with suspicion. “The kidnappers eventually tried to take the parents to court to force them to take the kid back. When that didn’t work, they just pled guilty to that and enough other crimes for them to get put in the Tanty in order to get away from him.”

Deacon beamed, replacing Sybil’s two cards and then two more that Vimes had discarded. “Right, so I’m just here to enjoy my last few days of freedom before the same thing happens to me.” The werewolf Valentine discarded three of his cards, which Deacon replaced before discarding and replacing two of his own, then he continued, “Actually, speaking of criminal confessions…” and he took a break from dealing to set a couple of small dragon figurines on the table, his expression going suddenly sheepish. 

“Oh!” exclaimed Sybil while Deacon started dealing out the remaining cards, face-up to everyone but him. “I’d wondered where those had gotten to! Thank you so much for finding them, Mr. Deacon.”

Deacon rubbed the back of her head while the others began looking over their cards and working out what sort of hands they could make. “Yeah, well, Mango nicked them during the party,” he admitted, “but apparently she didn’t leave a proper receipt, so hey, you get them back!”

The organic Valentine considered his cards. He thought he might try to lead with a Flush if he could, but it looked like he was sitting on a Triple Onion. “A receipt?” he asked. “So you got her into the Thieves’ Guild?”

Deacon’s eyebrows went up enough to peek out from behind his sunglasses. “I wasn’t going to let her keep operating unlicensed in _this_ city! Don’t worry, she knows the rules. Proper receipts now, and I make her return anything I catch her taking.” He grinned. “If she can’t get good enough to avoid getting caught by _me_ , she doesn’t deserve to keep whatever it is.”

Vimes scowled as he looked over his own cards. He pointed out, “But the Thieves’ Guild doesn’t target this place!”

Deacon managed an expression that would have passed for genuine innocence on anyone that wasn’t Deacon. “Really? I didn’t see the shield marking that shows you paid up.”

Vimes scowled and took a sip of his Cheery Cherry. “That’s because I’m not going to pay a bunch of bloody thieves off just to leave my place alone! I can take care of that myself!” 

Deacon practically beamed. “Of course you can, Whispers! Everyone in the city knows how impenetrable your home’s traps are!” Deacon got caught in those same traps enough to know, but every once in a while, maybe one try out of fifteen, he found his way through. “Look, don’t worry, if I catch her with anything of yours, I’ll give it back. I’m pretty sure she’s just trying to see what she can get away with.”

Valentine’s synth self looked thoughtful for a moment. “‘What she can get away with.’ Which, uh, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t your ‘rules’ pretty much amount to, ‘Anything’s allowed as long as you don’t get caught’?” 

Deacon shrugged. “Well, yeah, but that pretty much applies to every kid, maybe even every person, ever. As far as I’m concerned, this is the one time when I’m being _more_ honest than almost everyone else out there. Besides, this whole thing’s been kind of hard on her. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you invited us, it’s good to see her playing with kids that aren’t, well, Sweethearts, but a couple of weeks ago she was a homeless orphan, and almost as soon as she isn’t, she gets invited to the birthday party of the sons of the richest man in the city. You set a high bar, Sam!”

Sybil gave Deacon a sympathetic look, but she seemed slightly confused as to what Deacon meant. Sam, however, winced, and Piper groaned. “Tell me about it! Nat’s gotten into dwarfish fashion! I think if I budget right, I can just about afford a micromail shirt for her by Hogswatch, but now she’s been talking about Retribushium, and there’s no way I’ll be able to afford that!” She pointed to her cards. “By the way, Broken Flush,” she added, pointing out the hand that Valentine would have to beat to stay in the round.

“Oh, Piper, dear, you shouldn’t get her micromail!” exclaimed Sybil. “She’s much too young!”

Deacon muttered, “Sure, swords are great for eight year olds, but a ten year old’s too young for armor.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that!” Sybil laughed. “It’s just that she’s still growing! You should consider finding her a nice battleaxe this year and hold off on the micromail until she’s older.”

Deacon, with exaggerated brightness, exclaimed, “Right! Obviously! If they can’t out-Grognak Grognak by the time they’re twelve, what are you even doing?” 

The werewolf Valentine snorted. 

Sybil frowned, faintly confused. “Grognak?”

Vimes coughed. “I, er, think he’s Cohen, dear. Only not real.”

“ _Oh!_ ” Sybil grinned, though she covered her mouth with her free hand. “Oh, that is amusing…”

Piper considered what Sybil had said about Nat still growing. “That actually is pretty good advice. I’ll keep it in mind!”

Both the organic Valentine and the Synth one began speaking. “So when’s-” They stopped and glanced at each other. The werewolf nodded towards the other almost imperceptibly, and the synth finished, “When’s Mango’s birthday, anyway?” Then he gestured to his cards and pointed out, “Four Card Onion.”

Vimes threw down his cards and Piper made a noise of disgust. “I’m out.”

Deacon shrugged. “Well, she says it’s mid-June. Of course, she already bummed a couple dollars off me a few months ago claiming it was her birthday, so I haven’t made up my mind whether I’m going to fall for it or not.”

Piper grabbed another cup from Codsworth and gave Deacon a confused frown. “So you’re just going to… let her make something up?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Deacon asked. “I don’t think she actually knows, anyway.”

“Yes, but if you keep pretending to fall for that sort of thing, she’s just going to walk all over you,” observed Vimes.

Deacon shrugged. “The thing is, I don’t think she’s ever had a birthday as part of a family, and me giving her two dollars awhile back isn’t a good enough reason to wait. It would be… it would be nice, I think.”

“Maybe you should just explain that you know she was pulling one over on you before,” Piper suggested, “but that it’s really important that you guys celebrate this as a family now. Just… be honest with her.”

Everyone at the table, even Sybil, even Codsworth with all three eyes, stared at Piper for a moment in silence. 

Piper covered her face with her hand. “Right, forgot who I was talking about for a moment.” Then she changed the subject. “So if she’s Thieves’ Guild, is that the school you’ve got her in?”

“Of course that’s the school she’s in!” Deacon answered, grinning. “C’mon, they’ve got such great class names! ‘Intellectual Crimes and Applied Maths’! ‘Confidence Trickery and Modern Languages’! It’s enough to make me jealous! I’ve been looking into their adult classes, as it is. I think I might sign up for their Loitering class.”

Piper laughed. “That does sound nice. I’ve been pretty lucky, since a ‘Mysterious Benefactor,’” Piper interrupted herself with an obviously fake coughing fit, during which the word ‘Blue’ could be heard, then continued, “has been paying Nat’s tuition at Spiteful Sisterhood of Seven-Handed Sek.”

Sybil beamed with pride. “My Sam is just wonderful about that sort of thing. He also makes sure the children of any Watchmen who die on duty are taken care of.” Then she frowned, thoughtful. “Actually, dear, I think at this point, it might be more… cost effective? Just to open a school.” The werewolf suspected that Sybil was only just pretending to come up with this idea just now. She did the finances. She’d _know_ what would be more efficient.

“What, some sort of… Watch school?” Vimes asked. “Not sure how that would go down.”

The werewolf Valentine sighed. “Can’t say I’m too impressed with the options around here,” and by this point he knew better than the others. “So you’re saying that Guilds can have schools, and Churches can have schools, and those idiots who run the Sunink Interspecies Academy get to have a school, and we got ways to make sure that a dead Watchman’s kid can learn to read, but not a live one’s?”

Vimes looked thoughtful.

5 Although natives of the Disc would consider it a full-sized deck. It’s poker players who aren’t playing with a full deck.

* * *

The old man was on high alert this time, and was keeping careful watch anytime Mango drifted near anything remotely valuable. Which, face it, in this joint, was everything. Of course, most of it was old, but that just made it old-valuable, which was even more valuable. Mango vaguely wondered what it was like to always be surrounded by things well-made enough to get old.

Not that it mattered, because she wasn’t nicking any nickknacks with the old man watching like a… well, like a hawk, though not a Lancre Wowhawk, those birds were rubbish. Steamhawks were much better. She’d know; she’d made them up herself, though she was sure that she had her new old man convinced that Steamhawks were native in distant Big Cabbage. It hadn’t been that hard at the party, with so many people around to be served fancy whores-devours or whatever to and Old Sam ( _the_ Old Sam, the Sam for which the Old Sam got named) dragging Deac- er, Dad off for a chat and everything else what was going on. Manage to grab a tiny dragon right out from under the noses of both the old butler _and_ the Old Sam, hah! ‘Course, Dad had figured it out later and insisted on giving it back. Didn’t matter much to Mango, since she’d just taken it for the practice, but she didn’t see as it should matter much to the Vimeses, either. They had _so much_. Mango had never had a toy she hadn’t found floating in the gutter, and here these kids had more than they knew what to do with! 

Mango drifted near a lonely, neglected toy box while the other kids were playing on the floor in the other part of the room, but then the old butler cleared his throat and leveled a sharp look in her direction. “I wouldn’t, young miss,” he warned.

Mango snorted. She didn’t believe _that_ for a moment, but still she slunk away, back towards the other three, muttering, “Ain’t a ‘miss’.” She’d have to wait for the old man to let his guard down, and to do that, and for that to work, she’d have to pretend to take an interest in whatever the toffs - well, and Nat - were doing. She dropped to the floor between Nat and Young Sam. “Whatcher doing?”

“Finding the connections,” answered Nat quietly, even ominously. 

Mango looked down at what they were doing. They had a bunch of newspapers, old and new, scattered about, and were cutting out headlines and other phrases and gluing them to a larger sheet of paper and then drawing lines between them. The whole mess reminded Mango a bit of some of the projects she’d done in the Scouts, minus the occasional ear and plus a whole bunch of letters. 

If she were forced to be honest with herself (which was rare, one of the advantages of having been adopted by Deacon), Mango was struggling a bit with the letters. She had been one of the better with letters in the Sweethearts, but in the Guild school, it seemed like all the other kids in her Confidence Trickery & Languages class had gotten a head start on her. She supposed they had. At first she hadn’t seen the point of it all, after all, she was already doing solid in the Maths, but Dea- Dad had told her that she couldn’t see what the words _weren’t_ saying if she couldn’t read them to begin with.

She looked over all the lines and connections scribbled all over the paper, and supposed this exercise was about seeing what the words weren’t saying, too.

There was a newspaper headline titled, “Miracle Cure Kills Sixth Patient”. Mango remembered hearing about that one, it was old Doc Clayton who’d been caught selling run-off from some of the Unreal Estate Shops, but for some reason a line had been drawn between that and an advertisement for an apothecary out on Wootton Point named Jason Hale. Mango didn’t recognize that street name, so she assumed it was somewhere outside the walls proper. From there there was another line to a report that claimed that the Ankh’s smell had been changing. Well, sure, that’d be all the soot and dust and whatnot from those steam engines, wouldn’t it? Stood to reason. There were similar lines drawn about the paper, including one to the Harry King’s name, which had been circled and underlined, and another to the word Patrician. It all got a bit hard to follow, especially because Young Sam seemed intent to draw lines between any two headlines that contained matching words, meaning any report of _anyone_ being killed was connected back to the Miracle Cure headline and to each other. 

Shaun was looking over several maps, and he argued, “But that can’t be right, Father already solved that one!” Now, of course, Mango recalled hearing that it had actually been a dwarf what figured it all out, but she supposed that one side effect of becoming a Sammy was when you actually managed to get a thing done, it meant that Sammy did it, even if in this case Sammy was actually Hacknee. “They caught him! They caught him, so he can’t be out in… Wootton…” he pointed to where the street was, a bit Rimward of the Least Gate. 

“That’s what they want us to think,” Nat proclaimed. Mango grinned.

Young Sam paused in the middle of drawing a line between a story about a man declaring himself the “Sitting in a Floating Barrel” champion and one about a parade float getting stolen. “Wootton’s pretty far from the Unreal Estates,” he observed doubtfully.

“That’s why he hasn’t been caught!” Nat declared.

“But he has been caught!” complained Shaun.

“Heard he had an accomplice,” Mango casually interjected. She hadn’t, but who knew? Maybe he could have!

Nat brightened. “I bet that’s it! It’s his _accomplice_!”

“If he had an accomplice, Father would have found him, too,” Shaun countered.

“Not always! He can’t be everywhere at once!” Nat replied.

“Dad can be two places at once,” Young Sam observed.

“But right now both those places’re the other room,” Mango pointed out.

“Your father can’t catch _all_ of the criminals, anyway,” Nat insisted.

“Yes he can,” Young Sam replied with the confidence of an eight year old who didn’t grow up on Sweetheart Lane.

“Nuh-uh! Because Vetinari keeps him too busy to find out everything!” Nat pointed to Vetinari’s name.

Shaun frowned thoughtfully. “Uncle Vetinari does keep Father pretty busy,” he allowed. Uncle? Really? Bloody toffs. 

“That’s because he’s in on it!” Nat declared. 

“But Uncle Vetinari had him hanged when they brought him in,” Shaun said doubtfully.

“Yes! To cover his tracks!” explained Nat.

“Tracks in the Ankh?” Young Sam asked, looking at the headline about the river’s smell changing.

Mango shrugged. “If there’s any river you had to cover your tracks in, it’d be the Ankh. Y’know the Sweethearts used to make new members run back and forth across the Ankh. If you made it back without falling through the crust, you got to get in an account of being fast and light-footed, but if you fell through the crust you hadda fight whatever was underneath.” Nearby, Willikins snorted in amused disbelief. Well, she let him. She doubted he could prove her wrong.

“What’s beneath?” asked Young Sam.

“Was it a mirelurk?” asked Shaun.

“Couldn’t be,” declared Nat. “They killed all the mirelurks, on account of them tasting too good.” That actually sounded pretty reasonable. Once, while they’d been eating crab cakes, Dad had mentioned that he liked mirelurks and salsa, and given what she’d heard about their size, they sounded like good eating.

Mango looked at the confusing tangle of lines and asked, “Say, I missed the whole point of this, anyway. Like, what’s he trying to accomplish, what with changing the Smell and selling Unreal run-off and whatnot?”

“Oh, that. Vetinari’s trying to sell all of the stuff in the water to Harry King, that way Vetinari can keep funding his spy networks and Harry King can sell it ‘gain and buy more railways,” explained Nat.

Mango thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, okay, that makes sense.”

* * *

Turning into a wolf and sniffing around every single apothecary and alchemy lab and drug cookery in a copy of the The Compleat Ankh-Morpork from a Merchants’ Guild tourism booth was an option for trying to find a chemical that would smell like (but not exactly like) Cherry’s samples. It wasn’t a good option, but Valentine didn’t have the life experience to know why. The longer he was a wolf, the more he thought like a wolf, and wolves were not, at baseline, highly motivated to be drug-sniffing dogs. After a few hours by night, Valentine found himself absorbed sniffing street lamps.

Angua, however, did have the life experience to know what happened when she spent too much time as a wolf. The blonde “wolfhound” padded up to the street lamp, disapproval radiating, and she sniffed, “You can’t even trust that lamp post. Missy’s owner has been buying ‘mountain lion piss’ and dumping it there to try to keep the neighbourhood dogs away from Missy.”

Dimly, Valentine tried to grapple with the revelation that the smells on street lamps were faked. “...mountain lion?”

“It’s not,” Angua said primly. “The merchant down the way’s just got a particularly big tabby.”

Valentine laid his head down on his forepaws. He had to think about that for a while. Wow. False piss sales. He wanted to tell Deacon, but he didn’t know that Deacon would believe him, which struck him as absurdly funny. Valentine barked with laughter - well, no, he just barked. Then Valentine, who was wolf-drunk and stupid from being been a wolf for what was almost, but not quite, too long, asked Angua, “...I don’t think that was as funny as I thought it was just now. So is it just me, or do I get… dumb when I’ve been a wolf too long?”

“It’s just you,” Angua lied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S: As a heads up, the next chapter, chapter 10, will have sexually explicit contents. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip and rejoin us for chapter 11.**
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	10. A Dishonest Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warning: This chapter has sexually explicit content. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip and rejoin us in chapter 11.**
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_A Dishonest Man_

Vimes draped himself over the werewolf Valentine in their bed, the synth Valentine sitting on his other side, flipping through a book. The werewolf Valentine squirmed, and he protested, “Sam, you don’t have to. I understand if you don’t want to. I’m not human, I’m a werewolf, and -”

Vimes studied him, and he asked softly, "Didn't I tell you that I fancy nonhumans?"

The synth Valentine's fans whirred in the way that they do when he was doing a search of his memory banks; it was strange to hear it from the outside. He said, "Yeah," and the werewolf Valentine thought he remembered that, too. It had been an odd way of phrasing things in the Commonwealth.

"Am I a dishonest man?" Vimes continued, voice still soft.

"No," was the easy answer. Sam was honest when it mattered; no one would say otherwise.

Vimes embraced and kissed him, and when they both needed air, Valentine sniffed at the top of Vimes’s head. His sense of smell wasn’t as good as a biped, but Vimes still definitely smelled… blue? Navy blue. It was a powerful, commanding odor. 

Vimes’s scent was all over the synth Valentine, just like it was all over Sybil, and the werewolf Valentine probably smelled like he’d gone and rolled around on Vimes. It had dawned on Valentine that, when they’d all first arrived, Captain Angua had likely known exactly what sort of relationship between Valentine and Vimes there had been. He’d felt a wave of embarrassment, realizing that. Captain Sally might have known, too. Vampire noses weren’t quite as good as werewolf noses, but they were still pretty good. _Here’s the new rookie, he slept with the boss..._

While Valentine was thinking, Vimes laughed, self-deprecating. He put his hand on his face and looked from one Valentine to the other, fondly. “I spent so many years asking Angua and Carrot so many awkward questions, wondering how it all… worked. I must have been trying to get it straight in my head. But at the Crundells’ - that’s our summer home - there’s this… fresco in the bathroom. It’s… hmm. Heh. You’d have to see it.” Vimes turned an interesting shade of beet red, and Valentine could smell the embarrassment rolling off him. “But there are satyrs in the fresco. I’ve never actually met a satyr, you know? I think you get them more in Far Uberwald and the Ramtops…”

The werewolf Valentine rubbed Vimes’s reddened cheek with the back of his fingers. “But that fresco did it for you?”

“Oh gods yes,” Vimes mumbled. “Sybil and I had to… well.” He coughed. “Anyway, I’m not forcing myself, here. Please believe that I love you.”

The werewolf Valentine kissed him then, hands settling on his flanks, as Vimes wrapped his arms around him. The synth Valentine looked over, a slightly amused smile on his face.

Eventually, the werewolf Valentine frowned as he remembered something, and he asked, “Did you want me to get a muzzle? Captain Angua said -”

“Something similar to me. And no. Absolutely not,” Vimes said quickly. “Promise me you won’t bite me, and I’ll put that mouth of yours to much better use.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	11. Sunink After Dark * Community Howl * Heard About Biers* Wolf at the Door

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [In the Woods Somewhere](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJdTRF5d94k&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=9) by Hozier.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Sunink After Dark * Community Howl * Heard About Biers* Wolf at the Door_

There were at least three keys to the school, Valentine had learned by being an irrepressible nosy bastard: the headmaster’s, the janitor’s, and the nurse’s. School finished up at 3:30 PM, and he could easily stay two hours after, until 5:30 PM, and make it home by the golden hour of 6:00 PM. He usually did stay late. He said he wanted to offer tutoring hours, and Mensick wasn’t going to argue with free work. If students didn’t show, it was an excuse to see which teachers stuck around late. Most scattered as soon as they could.

Mr. Black, of Pseudopolis, liked to hang around late. Valentine was already quite sure what Black was cooking in his laboratory.

But in his second week as his split self, Valentine decided to see what he could turn up. He’d talked to students, teachers, and even parents. He’d watched. It was time to get a little hands on, or snout on, as the case might be.

Hands and the lovely velvet-wrapped set of lockpicks that Sam had gifted him for Hogswatch got him into the school after dark. The lock was easy; no one wanted what was in a school, and SIA displayed the guild sigil out front that declared them paid up with the Thieves’ Guild for the year. Then Valentine ducked into a supply closet. He took off his clothing, neatly folded it, and changed.

The supply closet had a ghostly white colour to it, to his sense of smell: faint bleach and dank mop. The wolf padded the school. He’d staked it out enough to know that the janitor didn’t come for another hour. Mr. Brody Hasting, the ghoul employed by SIA as janitor, was certainly a night person.

Valentine could smell traces of him here and there. His nose was very sensitive to undead bodies. Humans were easy to pick out. For example, Ms. Knowell, the History teacher, had a yellowish beige scent to her, like faded parchment. Dwarfs were pretty easy, too. There was no drinking age in Ankh-Morpork, and weak beer was often safer than the water, and even the weak dwarf beer that dwarf children drank stood out. Plenty of them liked beard oil for their beards, too. The handful of gnomes were easier to discern than the trolls were; there was no ancestral survival imperative for a werewolf to be able to scent a troll.

Putting tools aside, there was nothing permanent a troll could do to a werewolf, unless the troll was a rare one possessed of natural silver veins, and there was nothing a werewolf could do to a troll. It was better that they ignored each other. They didn’t even have the same prey, despite the fact that trolls did sometimes try to eat humans out of boredom.

Black’s little school alchemy lab did not disappoint. The heady smells of borax, fungus, lead, hubflowers, whiskey, asbestos, carrots, anti-freeze, and cranberries all mingled together and merged to give forth the artificial flavors of berry, grape, and orange.

Mentats.

But absolutely no troll drugs, not even Slap, which was classified as a recreational drug and was legal to possess in amounts no greater than 8 ounces.

Which was exactly what Valentine had expected.

His lips peeled back in distaste, baring his teeth. Valentine padded off, his search of the alchemy lab complete. He’d needed to search it. Mr. Black was the first person anyone was going to ask about in an investigation of troll drugs at a school. But he was too busy selling candy to children.

He nosed his way through the rest of the school. The gym reeked of armpit sweat and the blood of dodgeball. The school cafeteria… as far as he could tell, the beef for the humans was actually rat, the rat for the dwarfs was actually beef, the gnomes and goblin just had to deal with poorly executed human or dwarfish food put on a smaller plate, and the trolls were given concrete instead of rock. It was a school cafeteria. What did anyone expect?

He heard the creak of the door and inhaled the scent of the dead. Of all the nights for the janitor to decide to drop in early!

Valentine squeezed behind the lunch counter and hid under it, the lunchroom having only one exit, out to the hall. A sudden flickering pool of light entered the lunchroom, casting torchlight over the counter’s edge, and a dry, reedy voice called, “Wild wolves don’t break into schools, and they don’t leave neatly folded tweed sweaters in th’ supply closet. So I say to myself, well Brody, what’s a werewolf doing in th’ school? Come to do a mite of tidying, hmm?”

Valentine’s clothes were unceremoniously flung over the counter.

“Get yourself changed, and you, me, and Mr. Torch can have a nice discussion, understanding-like,” rasped Mr. Hasting, the janitor.

Valentine could hear him back away and shut the cafeteria door between them, as the torchlight winked out.

If only the cafeteria had windows, he thought.

Why’d he been so cocky when he knew the janitor was a ghoul? Valentine didn’t know much about the local type of ghouls. For all he knew, ghouls could see in the dark. Maybe his Commonwealth biases about ghouls were biting him in the tail. Reluctantly, he changed, and he dressed, his mind coming back to him in a rush, even as his senses remained. Valentine said softly, “Briybar Umlin,” one of the gnome students, “said that Myron Whitecastle stole his abacus and hid it somewhere in the school. I wanted to find it for him.”

“More like you wanted to raid Black’s stash. He knows you’ve been looking at it, skulking around th’ school off-hours,” said Hasting, who carefully, slowly, opened the cafeteria door and looked in, leading with the torch. “Asked me to come have a look-see early.”

“Not me. I’m not a chems man. Using that garbage is a quick way to end up in the hospital. Or the morgue,” Valentine said, irritated, not taking his eyes off the wrist and arm holding the torch.

“Well, well. I suppose we’ll see,” said Hasting, and he gestured back down the way towards the alchemy lab. He examined carefully and counted out little red, pink, purple, and orange pills, but everything seemed to come to his satisfaction.

As he was counting, Valentine decided to distract him, asking, “So what’s the deal with the ghouls, anyway? We didn’t get them much in the Great Outdoors.”

“What’s there to say? We eat corpses if you let us, and you don’t let us,” Hasting said bitterly. “Live humans, too, but I s’pose that’s more understandable that you don’t let us - well, you’re undead, y’self. S’pose I shouldn’t be blaming you. Really don’t get ghouls in th’ Great Outdoors?”

“Maybe we don’t have enough organized graveyards?” Valentine speculated glibly.

“Hum. Tha’ might do it. You ought to know your undead, in a big city like this. So my gramma says that her gramma said tha’, millennia ago, some demons snuck out of th’ Hells to go peeping on the Gods at Cori Celesti. Now, they’d take what they learned and pass it on to soothsayers down on the Disc. Twas a nice-like little racket. Cut out priests as the middle-men. Now one day, they were spying on a great godly feast. You - you’re actually listening?” Hasting paused, puzzled.

Valentine smiled and nodded.

Hasting went on, “Y’know, most folks just think we’re a sort of zombie, but it’s not tha’ at all. So, th’ Lady Summer was shaking her cornucopia around, Bibulous was rolling in th’ ambrosia… and Patina got wise, her and tha’ damn’d penguin. Caught ‘em salivating. Th’ Gods called down a swarm of comets and smote the peeping’ demons down to th’ Disc. They burned as they fell, burning off their wings, and they fell to a graveyard, where they were still so hungry, watching th’ Gods eat, that they fell on the corpses there and ate them right up. So ghouls have ever been, descendents of those poor suckers, struck down at th’ prime of their lives.”

The sins of the father always returned to roost.

Hasting shook his head. “Anyway, seems like you haven’t been meddling with Black’s, uh, side business. So get you gone. I’ll let you know if the wee gnome’s abacus turns up, one undead to another.”

Valentine said gratefully, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

He backed away carefully, and he deliberately took a way out that would take him past the nurse’s office. There was a faint scent of rotten eggs. _Bingo_. But Hasting was still there. Valentine couldn’t tarry. He had to get himself gone.

* * *

“C’mon, Valentine. We’re going to Biers,” said Angua. “I need to get you introduced to the werewolf community before this goes on too long and you sniff the wrong backside and get introduced to the furriers through the wrong door; and if we’re doing introductions, it better be at an event where you’re a biped, because you’re a hopeless wolf.”

“Hey, I’m pretty hopeless as a flesh-and-blood biped, too. I’m s’posed to be a synth, y’know,” Valentine replied, smiling crookedly. “At least I’m getting the hang of this whole lungs business.” He lit up a cigarette as they walked, and he coughed.

Angua wrinkled her nose at him.

“Hey, can’t kill me, right? ‘S not silver or fire,” Valentine said cheekily.

“That which does not kill you can still make you regret smoking that horrible-smelling thing around me,” Angua said lightly.

“Fine,” Valentine huffed, ashing the cigarette out on a nearby brick wall as they walked. Then he tucked the remainder of the cigarette behind his ear.

“Now look. We’re not touchy feely like the Black Ribboners. We don’t do sing alongs. We don’t hug. There’s no cocoa. You can buy your own drinks, but if I were you, I’d stick to the clear ones,” Angua directed.

“What, the pina coladas got too much rum in them?” Valentine asked. He could actually do daiquiris now without needing to dump his tanks. It was an exciting time for him and fruit-blended beverages.

“It’s not rum that there’s too much of.” Angua narrowed her eyes. “Anyway, you’re going to need to tell them that you were just recently bitten. No one’s going to believe you were whelped a werewolf.”

“There any other ways of becoming the lupine persuasion, aside from being bitten? And running into weird magic fields,” asked Valentine.

“Drinking the water from the pawprint of a werewolf,” Angua supplied.

“Oh, c’mon, who does that?” Valentine complained.

Angua started spelling, “F - E - T - I -”

“Sheesh, I get the picture,” Valentine said, waving her off.

Angua continued, “There are some enchanted streams in Far Uberwald, near Loko, that can do the trick. Or just give you cancer. There’s a magic salve, but most of them only make you greasy. You can try wearing a wolfskin, but the trick is, if the wolf’s still using it, you’ll end up worn on the inside. Oh, and there’s a certain sub-branch of the Omnian Church, where if you’re excommunicated -”

Valentine froze. DiMA said that there were inspiration particles that rained through the universe bringing ideas to minds. Well, Valentine sometimes had flashes of memory. Even if it didn’t make sense, he chalked them up to the original Nick Valentine, the one that he thought he looked like now. He recalled reading about Hughes de Camps D'Asvenes6, Count of Saint-Pol. As nobles did, he’d stormed a fort and put every man, woman, child, and priest to the sword and fire. It was a massacre.

As nobles went, it was nothing special.

Then Hughes became aware that Louis-le-Gros intended to avenge the massacre, and like a coward, Hughes had gone crawling to Pope7 Innocent II. He’d had no mercy for the slain, but he begged mercy then. Begged like a dog. The Pontiff had looked upon the wretch and said that he must expect to dree a long, a weary weird, which was something Wee Mad Arthur might say when he was in a particularly vengeful mood. And in Normandy, any man who was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church became a werewolf.

Excommunicated. That was what Angua had said. And to be fair, Valentine didn’t know that he’d ever been properly communicated in the first place. But he was shaking, breath quick, and there was concern on Angua’s face as she stated, “You’re a religious man.”

“Kinda,” Valentine mumbled. “I’ve… done a lot of wrong.”

“We all do. Get over it.” Angua turned crisply on her heel and kept walking.

Valentine held his hair, the texture of his own damn hair still strange against his fingers, and he shuffled after her. As they arrived, he tried to distract himself from his own theological dilemma and make conversation, “I’ve tried to go to Biers before. Didn’t go over so well.”

“I’d imagine not. It’s an undead bar,” Angua said faintly. She lowered her voice. “You’re unalive. Even the undead need something to look down on.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Valentine said, grimacing. Captain Angua was a damn good cop, but there was a reason why Commander Vimes left Captain Carrot in charge when he had to go out of the city.

“Dug another cousin out of the grave, Captain No Fun?” asked a scruffy man of indeterminate age in a trenchcoat and fedora as they entered Biers. He stood at the bar with a whisky that definitely wasn’t his first this night or even this hour.

He was a werewolf. Valentine knew this very definitely. He couldn’t say how he knew this, but he was sure of it. He’d seen the cove before, maybe at a clothing shop? He had taste, Valentine would give him that.

In fact, the entire bar had quite a lot of werewolves in it. There was Ludmilla - _that_ was the weird purple feeling he got about her! - and a wolf sitting at her heels. No, a werewolf. A wolfier one?

There was an old man who appeared to be in his 80s8, who looked and smelled like he’d recently been a farmer, aside from being a werewolf. He had, Valentine noted, the turtle holy symbol of the Omnians around his neck.

An Ephebian man with his fingers taped like a boxer9 looked over at him thoughtfully. Another werewolf.

Lastly, there was a young woman10 of about seventeen whose Ankh-Morpork-typical dress did not quite hide a tattoo of a windmill11.

Beyond the werewolves, there were vampires, bogeymen, a tooth fairy, a ghoul or two, and, of course, the bartender...

Angua was replying to the first werewolf, the one who’d called her ‘Captain No Fun’, “No. He’s not my cousin. Lottie coming?”

The man snorted. “Lottie’s got better things to do.”

“Better people, you mean,” Angua said bluntly.

“Yeah, them too,” the man agreed. He asided to Valentine, “Now Lottie - that’s Carlotta - _is_ her cousin.” He pointed at Angua.

“Third cousin. By marriage,” Angua said frostily, and she pulled up to the bar to flag down the bartender who was just called Igor. It wasn’t that he was an actual Igor. It was just a name.

“And you are?” asked the whisky-drinking werewolf, as if he was enjoying his own private joke.

Valentine glanced sidelong at Ludmilla. Well, damn. He’d introduced himself to her. ‘Ed Zwicky’ wasn’t going to fly. Oh well, he did say it was better to never try to hide what he was. “I’m Nick Valentine. I wandered into a magic field and got split into two people. This is one of me.”

The one at the bar finished his whisky, “Valentine-Vimes, right?”

“Yeah?” said Valentine, with the odd feeling that he ought to be laying his ears back.

The other man nodded benignly. “Right, so you’re Vimes’s bi-”

6 [Turning someone into a werewolf](https://books.google.com/books?id=I5_DAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT240&lpg=PT240&dq=Hughes+de+Camps+D%27Avesnes&source=bl&ots=hnY8qBxKwE&sig=ACfU3U2EOgBMdn9ZaCxZfPbRAvTvH3yIcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjs643r2d7mAhVLG80KHYOSDKEQ6AEwAHoECAwQAQ#v=onepage&q=Hughes%20de%20Camps%20D'Avesnes&f=false) as punishment to someone for slaughter seems counterproductive, but that’s how the story goes.

7 [If Popes are beerwolves, perhaps he just wanted more?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerwolf)

8 [One man’s werewolf is another man’s hound of god...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiess_of_Kaltenbrun)

9 [It’s best not to think too hard on the boxer’s potential diet.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damarchus)

10 [In some places, you could hold a witch trial at the same time as a werewolf trial.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf_witch_trials#The_Netherlands) It’s like getting two for the price of one when it comes to building bonfires to burn your neighbors.

11 [One may presume the windmills and tulips finally caught up with them.](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/The_Neverlands)

* * *

“Did you have to do that?” Angua said bitterly, as they walked away from Biers. “What happened to telling them you were Ed Zwicky, just bit recently?”

“Aw, c’mon, I’d already told Ludmilla who I am!” Valentine protested.

“You gave them a whole lecture on anti-invert prejudice. You threatened to go to Gift-of-Om-But-Not-the-Kind-You-Regift’s Book study. You got Demaenetus’s address,” Angua said, putting her hands on her hips.

“They had it coming,” Valentine said sullenly. “And it’s not like I asked for his address, he just insisted that I take it. Besides, I _am_ going to Gift-of-Om-But-Not-the-Kind-You-Regift’s Book study. I’m bringing chocolate biscuits.”

Angua exhaled. “You’re a cruel man, Valentine.”

* * *

It seemed like almost as soon as Valentine, or part of him, anyway, was in a position to appreciate the sheer variety of options Ankh-Morpork had available for lunchtime, he’d been sent to work outside the walls of the city proper, where the options were both less numerous and more spread apart. It seemed unfair on a cosmic level. At least in his role as a teacher, he had Octeday off, except, of course, for the time spent grading papers, preparing for the next day, and turning in reports at Cable Street. 

He had actually just turned in those reports and had decided to take advantage of being in the neighborhood to grab a lunch Gimlet’s Hole Food Delicatessen. The dining area of Gimlet’s was set up to comfortably accommodate customers in the sizes of Ankh-Morpork’s more common species: dwarfs, humans, and trolls, and so Nick sat at one of the human-sized tables grading papers while enjoying one of Gimlet’s “soss, rat, bean, and egg wrap, hold the rat”. Valentine wasn’t entirely sure Captain Angua would have approved of him including the egg in the wrap, but it seemed to him that eggs _had_ to be far enough from the things that hatched out of eggs to avoid setting off that “killer instinct”. Whoever heard of a werewolf mauling an egg in the dead of night? Sure, a desperate one might eat one for the sustenance, but after watching the sorts of sad salads Angua ate regularly, he already had a good idea of the sort of desperate measures a werewolf might take for sustenance.

Besides, eggs were good. The “soss” was pretty tasty, too.

“So, Nick, what does your tiny furry partner have to say about eating at a place like this?” Hancock sauntered up to Valentine’s table, set down an order of verminchelli in front of the seat opposite Valentine, and casually threw himself into the corresponding chair, all while grinning widely. 

“These days it seems I make him pretty nervous,” Valentine admitted, “although he’s polite enough to try and hide it. But before, Flavours just commented that this place is pretty good about where they source their food these days.” He leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “Rats are opportunistic omnivores. Apparently, it wasn’t that long ago that Flavour’s little group of educated rodents gave up eating each other. He’s actually pretty calm about rats being on the menu so long as it’s not him.”

“Glad to hear he don’t take it personal, though a shame about him being nervous around you,” Hancock observed, twirling some noodles around his fork. “The reason why wouldn’t have anything to do with that incident at Biers the other night, would it?” He grinned over his fork-full of rat pasta and then took a bite.

Valentine sighed. “You heard about that, huh?” 

Hancock swallowed and admitted, “Sure, I’m there on the semi-regular. I would probably be there more often, but the place is usually pretty dead in more ways than one, if you catch my meaning.” He chuckled. “Sorry I missed your little introduction to the ‘community’, though.”

“Well you know, Hancock, unlike some people, I’m actually undead,” Valentine observed.

“Oh, you wound me, Nick!” Hancock gasped, holding a hand over his heart. Then he grinned. “Besides, turns out being the product of mad science and experimental chems is pretty solid currency in that place, even if you _do_ have a beating heart. You’d be surprised at how many Igors have chatted me up.”

Valentine thought about the Watch Igorina, who had, for a time, harbored a crush on his brother DiMA. “No I wouldn’t.”

“That’s right, you work with one. Pretty cute one, too,” Hancock grinned turned a bit lecherous, “though I’m pretty sure she’s only after me for my body.” The grin turned into a smirk. “Mostly to study it. But speaking of work, I notice you haven’t been patrolling much lately. Or at all.” He took another bite of his vermincelli.

“They got me assigned to a different part of the city,” Valentine replied, attempting to shrug it off.

“Yeah, the part that’s outside of the hubwards gates, with surprisingly regular hours,” Hancock agreed cheerfully. Then he tilted his head and looked thoughtful. “But isn’t Cable Street a bit out of the way from Scoone Avenue?” He gave Valentine a meaningful look.

It was pretty obvious that Hancock had figured out he had been assigned to the Particulars. The ghoul occasionally came off as a bit drug-addled, but in truth he was both dangerously smart and dangerously observant, and his drug of choice tended to make him a bit more of both. Valentine sighed. “What do you know, Hancock?”

Hancock swallowed his noodles and pointed to the papers in front of Valentine. “For one thing, I notice that you’re grading math homework for someone who’s working in base four.”

Valentine winced. “Guess I should be more careful about where I’m doing that. Here I was mostly looking to avoid being too close to the University quarter.”

“Well that’s just a matter of self-preservation,” Hancock laughed, then he sobered quickly. “But seriously, Nick, afraid I don’t have anything for you. The uranium, wait, sorry, uselessium byproducts may give me a nice, comfy warmth, but I don’t got much use for troll drugs in general, and I’m still learning my way around the streets _inside_ the walls.” Valentine didn’t miss the fact that Hancock had immediately drawn a connection between his reassignment and troll drugs. “I’d be kind of surprised if it turned out to be anyone established, though.”

“You seem to know an awful lot for someone who doesn’t have anything for me,” Valentine observed neutrally.

Hancock gave Valentine a crooked grin. “What can I say? Turns out Ankh-Morpork is my kind of city.” Then he pointed to a small package in front of Valentine. “Since I know you’re not eating it, want to hand over your ‘Fortune Rat’?”

Valentine snorted. On Octedays, Gimli’s included a free fortune rat with all meals. Valentine had been considering taking it home for the boys, but he hadn’t been sure how to split it. Deciding to avoid the whole mess, he shrugged and handed it over. “Help yourself, Hancock.”

* * *

It was the evening of Octeday. The wolf Valentine sat at the edge of their bed, while the synth Valentine sat up near the headboard, paging through one of their notebooks. The werewolf commented, “Y’know, ol’ Sammy boy gets really turned on around me. I can smell it.”

The synth Valentine snorted and kept looking through his notebook. He sighed, slightly pained, “I bet he does. I make a surprisingly good-looking werewolf.”

The wolf Valentine smiled that smile with all the teeth and leaned over himself, adding in another note to the book with that same exacting handwriting that the synth was using, one that was more a font than anything else. “He still gets turned on just the same around you, too.”

“Well,” sighed the synth Valentine, closing the book. He picked up the glass of whisky that he was nursing off their nightstand. “We both knew Sam is crazy.”

The wolf Valentine crossed his arms. “No, I thought you should know that. I know that I get… insecure about not being human. Being able to smell that Sam’s turned on helps. He tries, y’know? He’s just not a verbally demonstrative man when it comes to love.”

The synth smiled faintly. “Thank you.”

“What doesn’t help, however,” the wolf Valentine sighed, “is that Sybil’s turned on by both of us. Of me. Whatever.”

“I could say I knew that intellectually,” the synth Valentine said, “it ain’t exactly subtle. The dame can’t lie. She just omits the truth on occasion.”

“We just gonna keep ignoring that?” asked the wolf Valentine, hunching up his haunches and kicking his feet over the edge of the bed.

The synth took a stiff drag on his whiskey and said, “Yup.”

* * *

Valentine, the werewolf one, went out for lunch. There wasn’t much in favour of sitting in the staff room at lunch, anyway, watching Ms. Knowell and Mr. Slicker drink their coffee with a white-knuckled grip on their mugs, staring thousand yard stares, while Mr. Black glared at Valentine. So Black’s suspicions about Valentine hadn’t panned out. So what?

After lunch, he went for a walk around on four feet.

Valentine could talk to dogs, or rather, dogs could talk to him. Angua hadn’t mentioned that. There was a lot that she seemed to think was obvious, and maybe it was to her, growing up the way she did. Most dogs didn’t have much to say.

A dog with a halo of stench like a many-eyed angel, if each eye was a hopping flea, _pst_ ed, “Yo, dogsbody.”

Valentine flicked an ear up and let his gaze drift over to the scruffy, greyish… well, maybe there was some terrier in there, desperately trying to get away from everything else. He didn’t want to get too close, because asking his synth self to pick him over for fleas sounded like the kind of memory he didn’t want to have from either angle. “Uh huh?”

“Hah, you’re new in this town! Won’t last long. This town, she chews you up and spits you out,” said the rangy little dog.

“Maybe, if you ask nicely,” said Valentine, distantly.

“I don’t know why’s I bovver… where’re you from? And whatcher name, you a Fangtail? You look like a Fangtail,” the dog insisted, huffing along, unable to match a wolf’s longer strides

Valentine considered his cover story. Eh, why not? “The Great Outdoors. I’m Ed. Ed Zwicky. Definitely not a Fangtail. You?”

“Oh, me? Gaspode,” said the dog, “Hmm. _Hmm_. You’ve been about with Angua, haven’t you? Not in a friendly sense, mind you, but oh, that girl will steer you wrong.” 

“Do tell,” prompted Valentine, amused.

“We-ell. She works for the Man, y’know,” said Gaspode. “Not a free spirit.”

“What’s so bad about working for the Man?” Valentine asked idly.

“‘S just no way to be,” said Gaspode firmly.

“It can be. If he’s a good enough man,” Valentine said absently.

“You’re a lost cause,” said Gaspode, shaking his head and waggling off towards an alley.

His saint shoulda been Jude, patron saint of lost causes, but he was Nick Valentine, and that would have to be close enough.

He recovered his outfit, changed, and was back just in time for the first class after lunch. Towards the end of the class, when he knew that the students had stopped paying attention, anyway, he picked up a steel ruler off his desk, and he gestured with it. Ms. Gramlich went walking by in the hallway, as she always did, like clockwork after lunch; the woman had a weak bladder.

Valentine clenched hard on the ruler. Wilburn, hopped up on Mentats because he’d _thought_ there was going to be a pop quiz, though he’d thought incorrectly, saw it first. Then Kugreack Sapphirearmour screamed, “Mr. Zwicky’s bleeding!”

He let the pain catch up with him and clutched his hand, making a show of laughing it off, “Oh, clumsy me, gripped the ruler too hard…”

Ms. Gramlich nosed into the classroom, saw Valentine clutching his bleeding hand, and immediately grabbed his elbow and started marching him to the nurse. She sighed, “You just get a bit too into those quadratic equations, don’t you? Happens to all the maths teachers, and then they don’t look what they’re doing. That’s when they slip up. That’s when the lemmas get them.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Valentine demurred.

“That was down to the bone, and no mistake. On your good chalking hand, too!” insisted Ms. Gramlich, looking at Valentine’s hand. Then she noticed his ring. “Have you a Missus?”

“No,” said Valentine softly, “I have a mister.”

Ms. Gramlich let him go and recoiled as if stung. “A molly maths teacher! Why, I never.”

“Uhm, I’m bisexual, actually, but there’s not anything mutually exclusive about being a molly and a maths teacher,” said Valentine.

“Oh, one of those new-fangled velocipedes! We wouldn’t have them about if the Duke didn’t go around shoving it in our faces, making it popular,” sniffed Ms. Gramlich.

“Uh. No,” said Valentine, looking back at the trail of blood that he’d left down the hallway. “No on every count I can ‘no’.”

Ms. Gramlich flung open the nurse’s office’s door, shoved Valentine inside, and shouted, “And do something about straightening him out, too, while you’re at it!” 

Then she flounced away, leaving Valentine and the nurse, Ms. Marissa Stalcup, staring at each other. Stalcup, in a bored tone of voice, directed, “Sit down, and I’ll have a look at it.”

Valentine sat down in the indicated chair. Stalcup examined his hand. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t that long ago that he’d been a wolf, and the senses lingered for a little golden period after the change. The thing that he noticed first and foremost was his own blood.

There was that faint scent of rotten eggs, though it didn’t smell quite like Crystal Slam. It didn’t match Slunkie, Slab, or Slice, though it evoked notes from all of them.

Stalcup pulled the ruler out of his hand in one violent yank and then poured carbolic over the wound, peering at it. Valentine yelped. She frowned and said, “This doesn’t look as deep as I thought it did.” She stood and peered down the hallway, looking at the trail of blood. “Or would account for that much blood loss.”

Valentine shrugged. He’d almost had it. Something in that one cabinet there.

Stalcup looked at his hand again. “You almost don’t need stitches. Almost. Here, I’ve a block for you to bite…”

She made it halfway through suturing his wound when he bit clean through the block. Stalcup sighed wearily, “I can see you’re a whiskey man.”

Valentine gave her an impish smile. “Got me in one. But to be fair, moonshine, too.” Less of that, now that he was in the Watch, but the Watch did have a weird duty shift wherein they tracked down illegal sills, judged the product, and then forced anyone with good enough product to fill out the forms to get a license. “And gin. And…”

“You are an intemperate man,” said Stalcup, pressing her lips together severely.

“Says the sweetheart with cabinets full of pills and potions,” Valentine teased.

“For the children,” Stalcup said stiffly.

“Yeah? What about those ones over there?” Valentine asked, gesturing in the general direction.

She stiffened. “I… can’t discuss patient-specific medications.”

_Can’t? Nose says don’t want to._

She finished his sutures. Valentine wandered over to the cabinet and peered through the glass. “Would a bottle of willow bark tincture do for my aching back?”

Stalcup tensed again, and Valentine knew damn well that the bottle labelled willow bark tincture was nothing of the sort. The smell was wrong. She suggested acidly, “I think black drop12 is more your speed.”

He needed a sample from one of those bottles, but he couldn’t get it now, not with her here. “Come back in seven days to get the sutures out?”

Stalcup narrowed her eyes. “You know how long sutures stay in?”

Damn! Maybe he’d paid too much attention to Igorina patching up other Watchmen, though she was experimenting with absorbable sutures, these days. Valentine smiled at her again. “I’m an intemperate man.”

12 [The active ingredient is the nutmeg, right?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendal_Black_Drop)

* * *

Moonstone, the gnome Briybar Umlin, and Vommad Mountainshield showed up at the end of the day to pester him with maths questions. It was unfair. He had some questions of his own for them.

Valentine picked at his stitches; he didn’t need them anymore, and his nails were sharp enough to tweeze them out. “That school nurse, Ms. Stalcup. She ever give you anything?”

“A rap across the fingers with a ruler?” Vommad offered up. “I ate some bad rat and had a stomach ache, and she said I was just faking for attention.”

Valentine grimaced. Well, he thought he knew exactly what it was that made that “rat” so bad to someone whose stomach wasn’t used to beef. 

Briybar said proudly, “A dirty look! Of course, I was climbing out her ceiling… I got lost. School’s confusing.”

“I meant like medications. Y’know, if you get injured or sick,” Valentine clarified.

“Oh, no,” said Briybar. “My mum says you just take a nip of turpentine, and you’re right as rain. Haven’t time for bigjob medicines.”

Moonstone was very, very quiet.

Valentine decided to engage her, “Moonstone, you ever see or hear about Ms. Stalcup giving someone something?”

Moonstone looked guiltily at the faded runes carved on her arms. She mumbled, “Sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Valentine asked gently.

“If we bad,” Moonstone said quietly. “She say, ‘You bad troll, you gon be lawn ornament,’” Vommad twitched; ‘lawn ornament’ was a common slur against dwarfs, but insofar as trolls were made of rocks, Valentine could see how it could apply in a grisly sense to trolls, too, “‘You take this. Be good troll. Be quiet troll.’”

Valentine was silent a moment. He was sure Bluejohn and the other officers would have asked if they’d taken anything from strangers, but the school nurse wasn’t a stranger, or from drug pushers, but the school nurse didn’t fit the mental template image of ‘drug pusher’. The lil’ pebbles coulda told the officers ‘no’ to all that and been telling the perfect truth, and the Lord knew, they had their reasons not to want to talk too much about maybe doing drugs to the stern officers, not when the penalties for being associated with troll drugs were so high. Not when the school nurse was saying it was a sort of medication for being bad.

Valentine drummed his fingers on the wooden desk, and they made a _click click click_ noise, almost as if his fingertips were still bare metal. Guiltily, he retracted his claws. Damn, but this whole business boiled his blood!

But why give drugs to kids? Drugs, at least the good ones, as Hancock might put it, were expensive! No one liked some stranger’s kids enough to give them free drugs.

He asked softly, “Moonstone, I’m not going to ask if Ms. Stalcup gave the… medication to you or if this is just something you heard from your friends, but could you talk to your friends, and if she tries to give more to you or someone you know, d’ya think you could pretend to take it but hide it on the down low?”

“Maybe,” Moonstone said, not looking at him.

Briybar blinked and asked, “Is something bad happening, Mr. Zwicky?”

“Maybe,” said Valentine, and he distracted them with quadratic equations, and then he went home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: We see exactly one [ghoul](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Ghouls) in the Discworld series, [Mrs. Drull](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Mrs._Drull), who is a member of Reg Shoe’s Fresh Start Club. About all we can infer from her appearance in Reaper Man is that ghouls have a reputation for eating human, and that the meat pasties she brought in didn’t actually contain any human, they were just terrible. Some of the supplemental material suggests that Mrs. Drill went on to run a catering business, so presumably her skills improved (or Ankh-Morpork’s standards really are just that low).
> 
> This leaves the question of just what ghouls are in the Disc. A lot of modern fantasy treats them, more or less, as just another variety of zombie, but after thinking it over, we decided we wanted to pull a bit from some of the [older legends](https://www.britannica.com/topic/ghoul) of them that had them as a sort of demon.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	12. Similar, Not the Same * A Cruel Man * A Dangerous Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Remedy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTVl2GeNfqI&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=10) by Seether.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Similar, Not the Same * A Cruel Man * A Dangerous Man_

Of the three troll children who died of an overdose of something that Valentine was now strongly suspecting was not Crystal Slam at all, the most recently deceased was little Chondrite, who’d only been in First Form. He’d been interred in one of the new suburban graveyards, which Valentine visited when night fell. City trolls were startlingly like humans in their burial practices, at least in the end results. His family had been reasonably well-to-do. They’d bought the kid a small stone tomb. Valentine thought this lead would dry up when he saw it. He wasn’t particularly strong… as a synth.

Now he was 217 pounds of werewolf muscle. 

Valentine shifted the lid and bit his lip, looking at the dead child. He’d been dead over a month now. It had taken André some time to place a Particular in the school. If there was any smell left, it would be faint.

Valentine changed.

There was the hard-to-discern sort-of-smell of a troll, and then, like a whisper, rotten eggs. Not the rotten eggs of Crystal Slam. Similar, but not the same. The scent, however, was just the same as whatever there was in Stalcup’s cabinets, the little bottles that were labelled willow bark tincture and definitely weren’t.

* * *

Constable Nick Valentine, the synth one, usually did his patrols with the talking rat, Artificial Flavours, but the Ankh-Morpork Watch liked to rotate patrol partners regularly, and that evening, while his organic self was in New Ankh investigating the tomb of a pebble one month gone, the synth Valentine was walking a route along Abattoirs Lane with Constable Keenside.

Valentine thought he’d spotted a familiar figure off to one side of the road, kneeling over someone seated on the ground, and as he moved closer, Keenside following cautiously behind him, he became sure of it. He was about to call out Hancock’s name when the other man caught sight of the approaching Watchmen and exclaimed, “‘Ey, it’s that Constable with the metal teeth!”

Both Valentine and Keenside replied, “Yes?” before pausing to look at each other. Hancock glanced over his shoulder from where he was… bandaging the other man? He looked over both the Watchmen and gave them an amused smirk over the confusion.

“Er, sorry,” clarified the other man. “Meant the human one. Hadn’t noticed yours, mister. I meant the kid over there.” 

Keenside sighed and closed his lips self-consciously over his metal teeth. “M’name’s Keenside,” he added, though his hand went up to cover his mouth when he talked13.

“Ah, sure,” Valentine answered, then looked at the blood starting to leak through the man’s bandages, then to Hancock. “Mind explaining what’s going on here?”

The man on the ground barked a laugh. “Nothing to worry about, officers! Bit of a, erm, professional mistake here, is all.”

Hancock checked his work, stood up, and gave Valentine a smug grin. “Guild mugger,” he explained. He looked down at the other man and raised one hairless eyebrow. “One who needs to be more careful about picking his marks, right, Hagley?”

“Right you are, Mister Hancock,” Hagley replied, getting carefully to his feet while holding a hand gingerly over the bandage. “No hard feelings?”

“Nah,” replied Hancock. “Just get out of here,” he added, a slight hint of a threat to his tone.

“Right away, sir,” the injured thief replied before hurrying off as fast as his new injury would allow.

Valentine looked Hancock up and down. “He tried to mug _you_?” he asked, disbelieving. Hancock grinned and nodded. “And you let him live?” Valentine asked, tone even less believing. 

Hancock shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, well… wouldn’t have, when I first arrived, but I eventually figured out that if I let the Guild ones live, they get word back to the others, and then _usually_ the only ones that bother are the unlicensed ones, our... imperceptive friend back there notwithstanding.” He grinned and started to walk alongside the two Watchmen as they returned to proceeding. “And then I can pick up a bounty for the unlicensed ones _in addition_ to grabbing whatever they had on them. Besides, I appreciate how… professional the Guild Thieves are about the whole thing. They don’t take it personal, they don’t hold grudges.”

Valentine studied the ghoul for a moment and then observed, “You seem to have made yourself right at home here.”

Hancock considered that for a moment. “I suppose this city _feels_ like home. Sure, some areas are a lot more… Goodneighbor than others, but it’s hard to imagine this Disc having a city that’s more home than this one.” He tilted his head and looked thoughtful. “Though I guess I can’t be sure without seeing a few of the others…” He trailed off a moment, then said, “That’ll have to come later, though. Got a meeting with that trouble-making friend of yours tomorrow.”

Valentine gave Hancock a sidelong glance out of the corner of his optic. “That’d be you, Hancock.”

Hancock waved off the comment. “Nah, the other one, and I _don’t_ mean the reporter, either.”

“Deacon?” Valentine asked.

“That the bloke with the Trust?” interjected Keenside, curiously.

“That’s the one,” Hancock agreed cheerfully. “Got wind of a merchant coming into town hoping to offload a golem, think he’s looking to keep them out of King’s hands.”

“Ah, I hope the Trust gets ‘im, then. Got a lot of golems in the Watch, once they’re paid off. Good blokes. Most of ‘em will trade a shift for you right off, no questions asked.” Keenside grinned, and the dim light from a nearby window glinted off his metal teeth. “Kinda like you, Nick.”

Valentine sighed. “Yeah, I hear those comparisons a lot.”

13 Keenside and his teeth had suffered an accident with a mix up between a speaking tube and a parcel tube some years ago. Luckily, the Watch had a dental plan. However, said dental plan was Igorina. Keenside considered himself lucky to have gotten away with only metal teeth, all things said.

* * *

After examining Chondrite’s body, Valentine played it smart. He didn’t go back to SIA by night, not when Mr. Hasting might show up at any time. He showed up early in the morning and got in just after Mensick got in.

The Headmaster flagged him down and back to his office, frowning. He started, “I believe there has been a misunderstanding between you and Ms. Gramlich. She is under the misconception that you are an… invert.”

“Nope, she understood me pretty well,” Valentine replied breezily.

“Do you really think that’s appropriate, in front of children?” Mensick asked, the picture of concern.

Valentine tilted his head to one side. “...existing?”

“Could you just be less bent about it?” Mensick said.

“No. All of my ability to plot hyperbolic curves is tied into finding men attractive,” Valentine drawled.

Mensick sighed. “Oh. I suppose the children do need to learn about hyperbolic curves.”

Valentine stared. Then he sighed.

“Just try not to be too flamboyant,” Mensick scolded.

Valentine looked down at his sweater vest. “I’ll try.”

He stole away, and he slipped into the nurse’s office before she got in. He grabbed one of those little bottles of ‘willow bark tincture’ and replaced it with an actual bottle of willow bark tincture. 

Then Valentine snuck into the records. The three troll students who’d overdosed all had long records of failing test scores, detentions, and other disciplinary actions.

The early bird got the worm. The early wolf got the goods.

* * *

Over lunch, he took the bottle back to Cheery, and he leaned against her doorjamb. “Tell me it ain’t what I think it is, Sarge.”

“I don’t know what you think it is, Valentine,” said Cheery, peering at the pill tablets in the bottle. “It sort of looks like Slunkie pressed into tablets.” 

She had a patched-together device. It screamed when she brought it near the bottle. “Radioactive, whatever it is.”

Geiger counters had come to Ankh-Morpork. Ever since Sergeant Detritus had realized that troll drugs could be picked up with Geiger counters, he’d been lobbying that each Watch House ought to have one. It was certainly safer than having troll officers lick their fingers and watch the results. The particular Geiger counter that Cheery had on her lab bench had been cobbled together by Shaun Vimes, who just wanted to be helpful.

Valentine found it strange that he couldn’t pick up radioactivity anymore, not being a synth with a built-in Geiger counter, but the senses he had as a werewolf had certain compensations.

“I think it’s a new troll drug,” said Valentine.

“Could be,” said Cheery.

Valentine itched for a cigarette. “Here’s a question. If it is, it ain’t illegal, right?”

“I’d save that for the lawyers,” said Cheery, setting up her battery of tests.

“There isn’t a thing in the world I’d leave to those goons,” said Valentine, crossing his arms, “but we can still nail her on death by distribution. I just want to know who made this stuff.”

“The bottle comes from one of the big glass makers in town. Apothecaries buy them by the crate. This might even have been a bottle of willow bark tincture, before someone emptied it out and put these tablets in it,” said Cheery. 

“The label’s not Stalcup’s handwriting,” said Valentine. “The broad has a confederate. And I can’t say I’ve got a real motive yet.”

As she worked, Cheery said, “If you can smell the drug on the body, I’ll be able to get forensic evidence, if the parents agree. Radium hangs around a long, long time. You said there were more bottles in the cabinet. Get a warrant, and that’s material evidence, there. Some of the students might talk, if we can assure them they’re not in trouble. Her only hope’ll be that turning King’s Evidence might convince the Patrician to spare her life.”

“Yeah? You think there’s even a chance he would? Three troll kids dead and ol’ Vetinari with his treaties with Diamond, King of Trolls. Smart money says, we take her in, and she dies. She has to know that,” said Valentine cynically.

“I think you’re overestimating the average intelligence in Ankh-Morpork,” said Cheery.

Valentine thought about his students. Some of them, despite Ms. Gramlich’s best efforts, couldn’t read or write, but they could do statistics off the cuff. Being able to read the newspaper was nice, sure, but life or death was betting wrong against Chrysoprase in a horse race. Ankh-Morpork produced the sort of intelligence it needed. “When it comes to political maneuvering? I think I’m _underestimating_ it.”

* * *

Valentine filed the affidavits over lunch while Cheery worked, and then he went back to school. He taught his classes.

After school, a troll kid from Second Form, called Andesite, gave him a little envelope and said, “Don’t know nuffin’ ‘bout dis.”

Valentine was sure Andesite didn’t, looking at the little tablets in the envelope, identical-appearing to the ones in the willow bark tincture bottle.

“Y’know, Andesite, I’d love to help you out with polynomials, and I will tomorrow, but I think I need to talk to Ms. Stalcup.” Valentine looked at his hand. He’d picked out all the sutures. The cut had healed without a scar.

Andesite nodded in a knowing way. Valentine wished he knew what Andesite thought he knew.

He cornered Stalcup leaving the school, and he held up a little tablet and watched her face. She knew what that was, and she didn’t want to talk about it. Too bad. Valentine liked to talk.

“Maths problem. How many of these did Chondrite have the day he died?” Valentine asked.

“Shove off, pooftah,” Stalcup snarled.

“D’ya know what Diamond, King of Trolls, does to drug distributors?” said Valentine.

She paled. “It’s not a drug, not like that.”

“Gosh, with three dead pebbles, y’think anyone cares about semantics?” 

“It’s to help them pay attention!” Stalcup said stridently. “It’s a medicine. It’s not my fault that the dosage is still… experimental.”

All the sudden, Valentine felt like he was back in the Commonwealth, stumbling over the ruined records of Med-Tek. People didn’t give free recreational drugs to children, but people would absolutely conduct unethical medication testing on children, with an eye towards selling the medication later. An old terminal entry filtered to his consciousness.

> From: Med-Tek Sales/PR Department
> 
> CURRENT PRODUCT SALES:  
> \- MENTATS sales up 24% in school districts  
> \- FIXER sales up 12% in seeded zones
> 
> NEW PRODUCT FORECAST:  
> -PREVENT sales +250% projection 2078  
> -PREVENT sales +330% 2079 

He held up the little tablets and growled, “Who gave you these?”

She said miserably, “What’s it to you?”

“I don’t like dead kids,” Valentine snarled.

“Trolls! Dead trolls!” Stalcup protested, like that made any difference. If it did make a difference to her, Valentine wasn’t going to shed a tear for her if Vetinari had her dance the hemp fandango.

“Just tell me your supplier,” Valentine urged, forcing himself to sound calm and reasonable.

She stomped the bridge of his foot and started to scream. Valentine clamped his hands around her mouth. She put her elbow into his belly. He didn’t let go. He blocked the nasty, discreet little blackjack that she produced.

Then Valentine gave her a reason she might believe, “God, woman. I just want a cut.” He cautiously loosened his hand on her mouth.

She spat, “Jason Hale, apothecary. It was all his idea.”

Gently, he let her go, and he stalked off.

Coming the other way were two Watchmen with an arrest warrant with Stalcup’s name on it.

They said Valentine was cruel because he’d rather assign extra maths homework than cane children. They said Valentine was cruel because he’d try to use words to win hearts and minds rather than throw hands.

They didn’t know him very well.

* * *

Across the city, at the Drover’s Rest, an inn that served both the Carters and Drovers’ Guild and an excellent all-day breakfast, the street hellion Mango was enjoying a nourishing high-cholesterol meal with her adoptive father, and his… acquaintance, Hancock, who seemed to be an odd variant of a ghoul. Hancock and Deacon weren’t friends, Mango could tell. They were discussing… business. Something about how Harry King still owned a few golems and kept raising the price out of the Golem Trust’s purchasing ability.

Sensing the mood and deciding it needed changing, Mango pointed at Deacon and asked, “Whatcher team, anyway?”

Deacon murmured to himself, “Soccer? Er, football?” Then he confidently said, “The Academicals.”

Mango grinned widely and corrected, “What?! No! Get out of here! They’re academic league, anyway. Your team’s the Miners.”

Deacon blinked behind his circular sunglasses. "Hey, if _you_ knew the answer, why'd you ask?"

Hancock, who’d been taking a drink from a mug of thick, sludgy coffee that Mango was fairly certain contained more than just coffee, nearly choked with laughter. "You are in _so_ much trouble," he said to Deacon.

Mango turned towards Hancock, evaluating the odd undead man coolly from across the booth, " _You_ got a team?"

Hancock smiled crookedly. "As a matter of fact, I like the Pork Packers. Better watch yourself, Deacon, if you’re carrying Miners’ colours here."

Mango snorted in exasperation, "Oh, fuck off, the Packers're terrible!"

Deacon blinked again and snapped, also exasperated, "That's been a word here for all of three months! How do you know it already?!"

Hancock, if he wasn’t undead already, would have been dying from laughing again. Mango didn’t think what’d she said had been particularly funny, and what Deacon had said was just plain _weird_ \- “fuck” had always been a word! Then again, most of what Deacon said was pretty weird. 

“Got your hands full with this one, huh, Deacon?” Hancock asked, grinning.

Deacon just sighed, "Shut up, Hancock."

* * *

Mister Vimes was very particular about how prisoners were to be treated. Stalcup was given fresh straw in her cell, a warm meal, and a cup of cheap but decent wine. No one laid a hand on her.

But Detritus, who was very, very serious and had a stony face at baseline, patiently, implacably, like the growth of mountains, kept asking her questions. Stalcup wasn’t saying anything. A lot of perps did that. They got bored eventually, though, and they’d start talking, if there was someone to talk to. They were only human. Detritus was a troll. He could keep waiting and asking.

He _would_ keep waiting and asking. There were three lil’ pebbles in early graves. He’d tear down a mountain if he had to.

* * *

Jason Hale, apothecary, was on Wootton Point. His clerk was a young red-haired man who wasn’t particularly paying attention, instead writing in a notebook. Valentine had been casing the joint for a few minutes, taking in the floorplan, before the clerk even noticed him and looked up with a start. “Oh! Hullo there. Could I help you find something, mister?”

Valentine peered over the counter and glanced at the clerk’s notebook.

He had been writing…

> _Captain Carrot shirtlessly strode away from the tenement fire, which he had punched into extinguishment. His muscles rippled. He smiled benignly upon the crowd of tenement occupants, whom he had all personally evacuated by carrying princess-style. Carrot saw that one small child was coughing, and he said, “You. That cough. I know just the apothecary clerk that you need to see…”_

Valentine smiled at him and held up one of the little yellowcake pills. He asked, “Don’t suppose you could tell me what these are.”

The clerk sighed a little when Valentine smiled at him, and he took the pill to examine it. He then replied hopefully, “It’s a pill. Definitely. Yellow, too.”

“Thanks,” Valentine said dryly, “Seen anything like these before?”

“Oooh, I have seen so many things like this! You won’t believe how many things I’ve seen that are like this,” said the clerk, and he came out from behind the counter to proudly show Valentine bottle after bottle on the shelves.

Some of the pills were bigger or smaller. They were every colour of the rainbow. Valentine let the guy go on, because he was just so excited. After a few minutes, he looked over at the troll aisle, and he said, “Y’know, I’m looking for a refill for my friend Gabbro.”

“Gabbro?” The clerk frowned in thought. “Wait, are you talking about a troll? The aisle of troll medications is right over here.” He scurried off that way and gestured exapansibely at the tidy shelves. “Of course, we don’t stock very much. It’s a very… narrow market. Mostly sprays to encourage the healthy growth of lichens. Does your friend have trouble growing lichens?”

“His lichens are fine,” said Valentine. “He said this was medication to help him focus.”

“Really? I don’t think there’s anything like that on the market. Not for lack of trying, of course, the troll dollar’s as good as any,” he added hastily, “We’d love for there to be troll focus aids! They’d sell like, like… a desirable thing. Did he tell you where he got it? Mr. Hale’ll want to know who their supplier was...”

“Oh. Hum. I must have heard him wrong on the address,” Valentine said noncommittally.

By that point, their talking must have drawn some attention, because a tall man with bird-like mannerisms and stained fingertips came out from the back room. His smile was bright and brittle. The clerk immediately shrank away from him. He asked softly, pleasantly, “Could I help you with finding something?”

“Maybe. Y’seen anything like this?” asked Valentine, holding up the pill.

His expression didn’t change. “Where did you find this?”

“I’d like to ask you the same,” said Valentine.

Valentine had a practised optic - _eye_ \- at assessing if someone was a threat to him. He knew the tell-tale stiffening of muscles. The thing about having a bottle of ether thrown in his face was that, even though he dodged it, the pleasant-smelling fluids still splashed him, and his head swam. He brought up an arm to block whatever was coming next.

What was coming next was a needle, attached to a syringe.

Something that burned like tequila went in.

The world swam.

The world went off.

* * *

Jason Hale, apothecary, stood over the stranger dead on his floor, and he explained patiently to his clerk. “He was a dangerous man. You can tell. He had this on him.” He held up the little yellowcake pill. “This was self-defense.”

“Uhm, yessir,” said Finley Acheson, his clerk, glum and unsure. “What is that anyway, sir? He said it was a troll nostrum for focus? I know you’d love to get into that market...”

Hale turned the little yellowcake pill over in his fingers and said absently, “This is something like Crystal Slam. I’d never go near such a thing.”

“Oh. Yessir. He must have been a dangerous man, carrying that sort of thing around,” said Finley, sagging. “Why, and in this respectable establishment, too… ought I call the Watch? I know Sergeant Detritus is very hot about the Jus' say 'AarrghaarrghpleeassennononoUGH' campaign.”

“No. We needn’t trouble our overworked public defenders. There are… better uses of their time. Getting swamp dragons down from trees, perhaps. Call the resurrection men,” said Hale.

“Again, sir?” asked Finley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **J** : The Ankh-Morpork Thieves’ Guild is often presented as having a sort of, “Nothing personal, it’s just part of the job” approach to thieving that’s played up to a humorous extent. I sort of feel like this is the sort of thing Mayor “Perfectly Willing To Travel With Sole Right After Sole Kills His Bodyguard Because Hey, It Wasn’t Personal, They Were Just Getting A Job Done” Hancock could appreciate.
> 
> **A:** Discworld Noir teaches us that at least some trolls are buried in crypts, like humans, if they die young enough that they haven't turned into mountains.
> 
> Jason Hale is very loosely based on a character from an entirely different fandom, as is Finley Acheson. (Okay, so I confess: we're talking IDW Pharma and IDW First Aid. We spent too much time on the etymology of their names, too.)
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	13. Home Towards Home * Sc(d)ream * Actual Ghoul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Supply and Demand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBGqUaDQjnc&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=11) by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing and [Scavenger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ywUzK1wIs&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=12) by Emilie Autumn.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Home Towards Home * Sc(d)ream * Actual Ghoul_

Once, Vimes had been exacting about always being home at 6:00 PM, no later, to read to young Sam, and then to listen to young Sam read, once young Sam was older. Then the railroad had come, and Vimes had been called away on a long mission, guarding the Low Queen as she travelled to an important diplomatic summit, terrorists dogging her every step. Sybil’s Vimes had fallen out of being home regularly, then.

After Vimes’d brought home young Shaun, he’d tried again. He was good about it. He wasn’t late often.

Valentine was a different story. He was home on time most days, but not as often as Vimes. Sometimes it was just work; Valentine was assigned swing shift every now and then. Sometimes it was just Valentine. The man liked to go wandering.

But Sybil and Vimes had put the boys to bed, and no one had heard from the werewolf Valentine at all, so Sybil worried, as she’d worried when she knew her Vimes was out somewhere in the city, in the rain, doing who knows what.

“He’ll have checked in,” insisted Vimes, “Somewhere, with someone. Maybe he wanted to watch the interrogation - the case he’d been working brought in a suspect. I’ll have a look.”

“Eh. I know Sergeant Detritus can put a suspect under the broiler. I don’t know that I’d let spectating delay me that long,” said the synth Valentine. 

“He didn’t say anything to you?” Vimes asked sharply.

“Nah. Haven’t seen him since breakfast. I’ll have a look with you,” said the synth.

Those two would find the other Valentine, Sybil was sure, and if they were going out late, in the rain, they were going together. That made it a little easier for Sybil, knowing they had each other’s backs.

* * *

The Watch House wasn’t a home away from home for Vimes. It was more of a home towards home. It was more of a home than home. He felt guilty about that, sometimes, but only when he stopped to feel.

Detritus was still questioning the suspect that Valentine’s undercover work had turned up and who had been duly arrested by two other Watch members. She was a school nurse, Vimes was given to understand. Cheery said that the material evidence the search warrant had turned up was quite good. Even if Stalcup didn’t talk, there’d be a conviction.

Maybe that was the problem, because Stalcup wasn’t talking. Maybe she knew her days were numbered in numbers that even a First Form student could read and write.

Detritus would get her to talk eventually, Vimes was sure. He was persistent, if nothing else, punctuating the silence with, “It was you what done it.”

Vimes leaned against the wall, listening to Detritus, while Valentine asked Ping, who was acting as jailer, “Don’t s’pose my better half stopped around?”

Ping looked confused and looked over at Vimes, and Valentine sighed and clarified, “I mean, my… flesh and blood self, y’know how I got split?”

“Oh, right! No, no, he hasn’t been around,” confirmed Ping.

“We’ll check Cable Street,” said Vimes.

They walked. Valentine talked. “So… Stalcup’s gonna swing. She knows that. Three cute lil’ munchkins dead in the ground -”

“Not everyone thinks troll children are cute,” said Vimes.

“So I’m silicon-centric. Sue me,” Valentine said breezily, “So she has zero incentive to talk. She’s gonna stonewall Detritus, and sure, he’ll stonewall her right back. The news’ll get wind. Her supplier’ll hear, and they’ll scarper. Whoever set her up with this sick ‘experiment’ will set up shop somewhere else, and there’ll be more dead. Unless.”

He paused and lit a cigarette, cupping it to his face.

“Unless I talked to her before the Watch brought her in, sold her some line, and then I went walking to go have a look see ‘cos I was worried about the lead becoming a lead weight if I left it too long.”

“Maybe he checked in at Cable Street,” Vimes said.

“Maybe,” said Valentine, shrugging one eloquent shoulder.

André wasn’t in; he was at the Opera House this time of night. It was useful to the Watch to have operatives in various Guilds and institutions within the greater Ankh-Morpork area. Besides, the Opera House was a site frequented by the rich and famous, the class of criminal that Vimes took the most pleasure in arresting. The leads that André turned up there were gold.

Lance-Corporal Mecatl was in, though, rifling through several folders thoughtfully, chewing on a pen. She looked up and greeted, “Mister Vimes. Constable Valentine.”

Vimes didn’t know all of his Watch these days, but he remembered her. She was of Tezuman extraction, and she’d fled the Tezuman Empire to Ankh-Morpork under circumstances that Vimes was inclined to find sympathetic, and as many outsiders in need of a job did, she’d joined the Watch. She’d been a good beat officer, but she’d cultivated a talent for disguise that had led to her being tapped for the Particulars.

“Mecatl. You’ve heard that my… my husband, Nick was split into two people, yes?” said Vimes.

“Mecatl? I get to put a name to the face,” mused Valentine.

“If you’re putting a name to the face, I’m doing something wrong,” said Mecatl ruefully, “but yes, I’d heard.”

“I don’t suppose the human-looking Nick dropped by here?” Vimes asked, damned with faint hope.

Mecatl certainly caught the phrasing of ‘human-looking’. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen him, Mister Vimes. Why?”

“The other me didn’t come home tonight,” said Valentine, “which isn’t quite like me. And this the day when he’d turned in what he had, and some officers went ‘round and busted his suspect.”

“You think he went digging,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, pretty much. It’s what I’d do,” said Valentine. He looked to Vimes. They nodded to Mecatl in thanks and left her to sorting through case files, hitting the dark streets again

“He might just be out exploring with Deacon or getting a cup of coffee with Piper -” Vimes started.

“He’s been avoiding Piper,” Valentine mumbled.

“Why?” asked Vimes, blinking.

Valentine sighed. “Because when he first changed into a wolf, he was about to rip down Piper’s door when Angua tackled him.”

“Oh,” said Vimes. It was difficult to think about Valentine doing that sort of thing.

“Yeah. It’s awkward,” admitted Valentine. “And no, I don’t think he’s out exploring with Deacon, unless Deacon’s taken a sudden interest in helping root out drug cookers.”

“Hancock, then?” Vimes suggested.

Valentine raised his brow-ridge. “He wouldn’t be taking _me_ along for the sorts of reasons _he’d_ be looking for them. Product trials are a different matter. Look, just give me a bit, I’ll make some inquiries -” said Valentine.

“No, I’m going with you,” Vimes said stubbornly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“You need sleep, Sam,” said Valentine, concerned.

“I need you. All of you,” said Vimes, “and I’ve a missing officer.”

* * *

Many people had objected when members of the clan of Igors had started moving to places other than Uberwald. They blamed the unseasonal thunderstorms on them14. Igors had a Code, though, which they followed better than many religious folk followed their own particular commandments.

Never Contradict.

Never Complain.

Never Make Personal Remarks.

And Never, Ever Ask Questions. The big questions, that was to say, such as, “Why are we implanting a watermelon into a horse, Marther?” Not little questions, such as, “You fancy going out for curry?”

This particular Igor didn’t ask big questions when the resurrection men brought him bodies, such as, “Where’d you get this body?” or “Did he really go in for the Igor recycling plan?”

But he usually asked the resurrection men little questions like how long it had taken them to get the body to him and if they knew how long the body had been dead. He didn’t this time, and not least of all because they were usually wrong.

Igor didn’t ask this time because the body was still breathing - very, very slowly, the breaths of the heavily narcotized - and there was a pulse, faint and reedy, which he could only feel at the carotids, but there was a pulse.

None of that mattered. No one stayed breathing for long after he cracked the sternum, and every heart stopped beating when it was taken out of the chest.

He worked for a barber-surgeon, one Ruprecht Cnocc, who had plenty of patients who had ruined their bodies with drink, smoke, and rich living, who could do with a new liver or kidney, and Igor thought that this liver might well have three uses in it, narcotic overdose or not.

Igor might have thought more about the sharp fingernails, the slightly pointed teeth, and the golden eyes with the pinpoint pupils if he’d been in Uberwald, but he wasn’t in Uberwald, and he didn’t.

14 Although this actually was something to do with the Igors, it was still rude.

* * *

Woozy blackness took Valentine as the apothecary’s needle emptied itself into his arm. It was like feeling drunker than drunk. It was like a house with ten thousand floors, and it was him that was falling for them.

Then there was nothing.

Valentine awoke briefly, fitfully, with the brutal searing pain of being cut apart. He thought he was in the Institute again. He could have been in the Institute again, helpless, hopeless. 

But the Institute had never smelled like this, and it was white and gleaming, not dingy. There was a squashed spider on the ceiling. Boy, Valentine felt for that spider.

Blood rose in his mouth, a tidal wave rather than a scream.

The world shut down again.

* * *

Valentine and Vimes stopped by SIA. There was no one there but the janitor, a ghoul, who was rather skeptical of the two sketchy gentlemen snooping around at night.

“Mr. Zwicky? Who’s asking?” he said defensively, almost protectively. He glared at the synth Valentine, but many undead didn’t like unalive. It was the pecking order of things.

“Constable Valentine,” said the synth Valentine, pulling out his badge. “Mr. Zwicky’s spouse says he didn’t come home. It’s not like him.”

Hasting hissed. “Bloody plainclothes jobbers… an’ wha’s it to you? Folks go missing a week, and th’ Watch doesn’t lift finger one.”

Vimes frowned sourly. It was Ankh-Morpork. Someone going missing for a week was just a bender. Until it was someone he cared about. When it had been Angua, he’d commandeered a ship...

“Ennyone can flash a badge, I reckon. You coves working for Chrysoprase?” asked Hasting.

Vimes went stony, and Valentine said, “No, no… anyway, thanks for your help.”

They wandered around the premises, anyway, and outside, Valentine stopped to look at some footprints. “Looks like he went rimwards, only not as widdershins as the path I’d take to get home.”

“You can’t know that,” Vimes snapped.

“Sam. I know my own shoe size,” Valentine argued, pointing at the footprints, which disappeared into the general dust and muck of the road.

They went back to the Watch House, where Detritus was still questioning Stalcup. She looked ready to fall asleep. Valentine asked Detritus if he could have a word with her, and Detritus assented.

“Hey there, ma’am. I’m Constable Valentine - “ he started.

“One of those degenerate inverts, polluting our society,” she growled, but there was a hint of recognition when Valentine spoke, like she’d heard a ghost.

Their wedding had been a regrettably public affair.

“Ma’am, have you smelled Ankh-Morpork lately?” Valentine said wearily. “You really don’t need to worry about me polluting society. Society does that to itself. Look, I just wanted to ask you about Mr. Ed Zwicky.”

Stalcup eyed him very warily. “What about him?”

“When did you last see him?” asked Valentine.

Stalcup considered. “Just before your idiot compatriots arrested me - and I demand a lawyer, by the way.”

“Do you know where he was going?” said Valentine.

“No,” said Stalcup.

She was lying, Vimes was quite sure.

Valentine smiled at her and said, “Thank you, ma’am.” He looked to Detritus. “Back to you, Sarge.”

Valentine and Vimes left, and Vimes said to Valentine, “Detritus will get her to talk eventually. People get bored. They get lonely. They talk.”

“I know,” said Valentine. He idly pulled out his screwdriver and fiddled with his wrist. “She recognized my voice, but she doesn’t know what it means.”

They checked on Deacon, whom they found in his subterranean temple to conspiracy. Deacon greeted, “Hey Whispers, when do girls get their, you know, cycles?”

Vimes stared. “Deacon, I have boys!”

“Cool, I’ll ask Sybil or Piper,” said Deacon. “So. Sup? Oh, also, keep it down. Mango’s pretending to sleep, so I’m pretending not to wake her up.”

“The other me didn’t come home this night,” Valentine said quietly. “Sam wondered if maybe you’d seen him.”

“Yeah, flying on a broomstick -” Deacon started, and then he shook his head. “Coffee? You want coffee? You look tired, Whispers.”

“Yes please,” Vimes said gratefully.

They sat around Deacon’s tables with steaming mugs, and Valentine explained quietly, “There was a crooked nurse giving untested medications to kids. I think my other self got a lead on her supplier out of her and went to go have a look-see.”

“You think you wandered off to investigate a case and got into trouble? Wow. That’s not like you at all,” Deacon deadpanned.

Valentine rolled his eyes. Vimes stared into his coffee. Deacon had done it up with cream and sugar for him. How Deacon had lovely fresh dairy in an underground temple was a mystery that Vimes had elected to not explore yet.

“If I hear anything, I’ll let you know,” Deacon offered, looking from Vimes to Valentine.

“Thank you,” they said, and when Vimes had drunk his coffee, they headed out towards Piper’s little apartment, but along the way a familiar figure sidled up alongside Valentine. Vimes eyed the newcomer warily but still gave him a small nod of greeting.

“Hancock,” Valentine greeted.

Hancock grinned. “How you doing, Nick?”

“Wish I knew,” answered Valentine. “You wouldn’t happened to have run into my other self, would you?”

The grin faded from Hancock’s expression to be replaced with concern and he shook his head. “Afraid not, though that was actually why I was hoping to catch up with you. Might have heard something about a school nurse being brought in, with the man responsible for the arrest no where to be seen.”

“And just how’d _you_ hear about that already?” Vimes demanded.

“What, you telling me you _didn’t_ know that your Watchmen’re _horrible_ gossips?” Hancock’s almost non-existent lips pulled back once more into broad, somewhat unsettling smile. 

Vimes huffed. That was true enough, not that he wanted to admit it to Hancock. “So why’re they gossiping with _you_?”

“Because I’m a friendly guy,” he replied, then added, leering, “Sometimes _real_ friendly, if you catch my meaning.”

“I’d rather not,” muttered Vimes as Valentine just sighed. 

“Besides, it’s been pretty… educational, watching your Watch,” Hancock observed. “Gotta say, I like how heavy you are with the non-human patrols over in your own area of town. Probably really infuriates those upper-stands types living over there.”

Vimes gave Hancock a smile that was all teeth and agreed, “A bit, perhaps.”

“And it gets them used to seein’ the non-humans around and in an ‘official’ capacity,'' Hancock rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he walked alongside Valentine, opposite Vimes. “Whether they like it or not, it gets ‘em used to thinking of them as just part of this city. Clever.” Then he got back on topic. “Anyway, I’m guessing you’ve already checked the school…”

Valentine nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t get very far with the janitor, between being ‘unalive’ and a Watchman.”

“Yeah? He undead?” Hancock asked.

Vimes nodded. “Ghoul. An _actual_ one.”

Hancock chuckled, then suggested, “I could try talking to him. ‘Actual ghouls’ and zombies ain’t exactly natural allies, and truth is, as someone who once was human, or so my story goes, I’m probably closer to the latter. They get along all right in and around the city, though, what with both being undead.”

“Not ‘natural allies’?” Valentine asked, curious. He hadn’t heard about that, but the zombie he associated with most often was Reg, who was all about community building and the like. It wouldn’t be too surprising for Reg to downplay any issues between the groups.

Hancock shrugged. “Yeah, well… an ‘actual ghoul’s’ preferred diet consists of dead human, doesn’t it? And a zombie _is_ a dead human.” He tilted his head and added as a thoughtful aside, “Near as I can tell, most of the zombies don’t eat much at all. Strongfellows seems to have some drinks for ‘em, but they’re mostly based around embalming fluid.” He grimaced at the thought, but then continued. “But anyway, since the Ankh-Morpork ghouls mostly behave themselves and lay off the corpses, that means they’re also laying off the zombies. I might be able to get something out of him, on account of being fellow ‘undead’.” Then he grinned. “Not to mention being such a _charming_ guy.”

“Not sure how much it would help, since we know I left already,” Valentine cautioned, “but maybe he has _some_ idea where I went.”

“Worth a try, anyway,” Hancock nodded. “I’ll head out there.”

“Thank you, Hancock,” Vimes said in grudging sincerity.

“Sure,” Hancock waved absently as he started to stride off. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

Valentine and Vimes continued their walk towards Piper’s place. Their knocking at her door woke her up, and Piper came to the door yawning and in her nightgown, which was probably scandalous, but if Piper wasn’t inclined to care, neither was Vimes. She covered her mouth, stifling another yawn, and said, “Heeey. Nicky. Blue. What’s shaking?”

“Don’t suppose you’ve seen the other me around?” asked Valentine.

“Y’know, I haven’t. I’d almost think that he’s avoiding me. There was this new sandwich shop I wanted to see if he’d go try with me,” Piper said wistfully.

“I think he got a bit… derailed, investigating something. Lemme know if you hear anything?” said Valentine.

“What, like that time you were gone for weeks, stuck in 114?” said Piper.

“Hopefully not,” said Vimes. “We’ll let you get back to your sleep.”

As they walked away, Valentine said, “We should get you to sleep, too.” 

“Nonsense. There’s a dozen informants we could talk to,” Vimes insisted.

“I’ll turn up. Or I won’t. Either way, Stalcup’ll sing for ol’ Sarge Detritus eventually. We’ll have a better idea where I went, then,” said Valentine.

“I should ask Angua to have a look,” Vimes said gloomily.

“Like Hell you will,” the synth Valentine growled.

“Why not?” Vimes protested. “He’s a werewolf! She’d find him in a trice.”

“‘Cos she’s a Captain, and she’s buried under her own pile of cases, and if you put her on finding me, everyone’s going to be shouting nepotism,” said Valentine.

Vimes glowered at him. “It’s not special treatment! When Angua got dognapped to Klatch, we commandeered the _Milka_ to rescue her!”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re not sleeping with her. He’s me, and I know I don’t want to have to deal with the _shit_ I’m going to have to put up with if the Commander of the Watch pulls a Captain off whatever she’s doing to hunt down his AWOL husband,” said Valentine. “I mean, if we had a solid lead and all we needed was a nose, maybe, but not like this. Her time’s too valuable to waste.”

Vimes stared at Valentine. If this was Sybil, young Sam, or Shaun, he wouldn’t even be having this discussion. He’d have asked Angua. He wouldn’t even think about how it looked. But he had Valentine in front of him, telling him what Valentine would want and - 

The infuriating thing was, Valentine was right. Valentine was the one who had to live with the consequences of favouritism, not Vimes. ‘Live’ was the operative word, though. Vimes mumbled, “There are things that can kill a werewolf.”

Valentine rolled his glowing eyes. “Yeah. I hear you’re one of them. Don’t meddle. Just play this by the book. For both of me.”

They went home. Vimes laid in bed. He didn’t sleep.

* * *

Hancock strolled towards the Sunink Interspecies Academy. It wasn’t his first time outside the Ankh-Morpork main gates. He had explored quite a bit of the city, including the part that had spilled out beyond its ancient walls. The walls themselves pointed to an ancient need for fortification, while the amount of city outside them suggested that things had gotten a lot safer for quite a long time. You could figure out a lot about a city not just by looking at their walls and protections but where those things weren’t anymore.

Hancock thought over the ghouls he knew of in town. The _actual_ ghouls. They were pretty uncommon, even when compared with the other undead types. There was Mrs. Drull, a member of Reg’s little club; Spencer Burnt, over on Honey Pit; Pleas Godkim, near Crybaby; and of course, Juana Sweet, over with the Seamstresses, who were opening to catering to all sorts of tastes. He didn’t think he’d caught the name of the ghoul who worked at the Academy - Ankh-Morpork was a big city, after all, and even he couldn’t keep track of _everybody -_ yet - but he was pretty sure he’d heard there was one who worked there - because while Ankh-Morpork _was_ a big city, the undead community tended to know its own.

Hancock knocked heavily on one of the doors to the school, then waited a moment. He was just starting to consider pulling out his knife and trying to pry open the lock when the door unlocked itself and the janitor jerked it open. “Look, I already told yo-” he started, then stopped. “Wait! You’re not onna those Sammies.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “Unless you’re another one of them plainclothes jobbies.”

Hancock smiles faintly and shook his head. “Not me, brother. Name’s John Hancock. I’m just by checking up on a friend.”

“Friend?” the janitor asked, then he seemed to think something over. “That copper already came by asking about Mr. Zwicky. Said his husband reported him missing.” He studied Hancock. “You wouldn’t happen to be him, huh?”

It was twice the challenge to keep his expression neutral, first because… Mr. Zwicky? Really? And second, because of the janitor’s assumption about his relationship. “So what if I am?” Hancock demanded, throwing in a touch of defensiveness for good measure. Maybe he could get a bit further if he played to the janitor’s assumptions.

The janitor waved his hand absently. “Hey, I’m not judging. Anyway, if I were you I’d be careful about those coppers who came looking. The Watch don’t go looking for a bloke who’s only been gone a day, not their style. Whole thing’s pretty sketchy.”

“Yeah, I thought they seemed a couple of shady characters,” Hancock replied, rubbing his chin and glancing towards the ceiling as though he were genuinely considering the possibility that Sam Vimes and Nick Valentine were, in fact, a pair of corrupt Watchmen who had sinister designs on his husband.

“Glad to hear I’m not the only one who noticed,” agreed the janitor. “Anyway, name’s Brody Hasting. Think I might have heard of you, that ghoul what ain’t a ghoul? Not really one of us, but not quite a zombie, neither. Still,” he added sourly, “betting this city treats you like one, anyway.” He gave Hancock a sympathetic look, and Hancock nodded, encouraging the sympathy. 

“Wish I could help you,” Hasting continued, “but Zwicky was gone for the day before I even got in. Probably took off when the Watchmen came for the nurse. I know _I_ wouldn’t be around for that, especially since rumor has it that he was somehow involved in that mess. If I were him, _I’d_ be lying low, and I’m guessing you’d know better than I would where he’d go to ground…”

“If he were inside the city, sure,” Hancock replied, crossing his arms. “But I never had anything to do with his day job. Don’t suppose he mentioned anywhere outside the walls he might go?”

Hasting thought about it for the moment. “Well, he did get on well with the troll girl in his class, and her cousin works over at the racetracks… they’d know a thing or two about how to hide someone from the Watch, too, especially given who runs ‘em.”

Chrysoprase. Hancock was pretty sure that Hasting was on the wrong track, especially given the chain of faulty assumptions that had gotten him there, but on the other hand, if there _were_ rumors that Nick had been involved in what had happened with the nurse, and if that involvement had been in any way related to the troll children deaths that Hancock suspected Nick had been investigating…

It was probably a false lead, but on the other hand, getting himself into trouble with the Breccia seemed like just the sort of mess that Valentine would wind up in. Hancock decided that he’d look into it, just to be on the safe side.

Besides, he’d been looking for an excuse to size up Chrysoprase in person, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S: __** _Welcome Home_ has had no less than three pieces of art added to it! [Chapter 6](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351/chapters/61134457) has a fantastic new piece by [emma-heart-art](https://emma-heart-art.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr of poor ol’ Anvilfoot’s last moments, and [Chapter 12](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351/chapters/62318047) has a great pic by [Jack of Legends](https://the-mercurial-star-o-vesper.tumblr.com/) of the moment when Sam became aware of Nick’s arrival for a rescue (rads and Watch Commanders just don’t mix), as well as a pic of the Ankh-Morpork Children of Atom branch by myself.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	14. O Brother Where Art Me * Gone to Pieces * Bad Moon Rising * The Price of Magic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Aviary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUbeggGmiU&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=13) by Ego Likeness and [Telephone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwnvgz3ey78&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=14) by Lady Gaga.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_O Brother Where Art Me * Gone to Pieces * Bad Moon Rising * The Price of Magic_

At breakfast, the boys wondered where the rest of him was. Valentine didn’t have a good answer for them. Shaun, who’d known Valentine in the Commonwealth, reassured young Sam, saying, “He’s probably just holed up in the den of some gangsters. He’ll be fine.”

Valentine went on the beat with Flavours. The rat he was often partnered with hadn’t heard anything about his flesh and blood self, either.

It was a day of small crimes and scuffles and paperwork. 

When they wrapped up, Valentine quickly legged it over to Unseen University. A burning question occupied his mind, flickering in his transistors. He hunted down DiMA, and he asked, “So, can you ask Mister Stibbons what happens if my three months are up, and we don’t have both of me?”

“I can, but I would conjecture that the results will be undesirable. What occasions this question?” asked DiMA, leaning back on his stool to look up at his pacing brother.

“It’s nothing,” said Valentine.

“A question is never nothing with you,” DiMA said gently.

Valentine rubbed one of his temples. “Werewolf me didn’t show up at home last night. Didn’t show up for breakfast. He wasn’t at Pseudopolis Yard or the… other Watch House he’d been assigned to. Hancock, Piper and Deacon don’t know where he’s gone -”

Unstated was, _Yes, I know you’re my brother, and you weren’t even the fifth person I talked to about this._

But DiMA was non-judgemental, which was almost worse. “I could probably find him with Jaspement’s Bubble Sort.”

“Ehn. I don’t know, DiMA. You know Sam’s not really big on magic,” Valentine said weakly.

“Commander Vimes is not here,” DiMA observed neutrally. “What do you want?”

“What can it hurt?” Valentine asked, voice a whisper.

DiMA gave him a sad smile. Then he walked over to Alf, who was hunched over, scribing out a spell on a parchment, and he picked up Alf’s bottle of Cheery Cola, opened it, and dumped it into a dish. 

“Hey, I was going to drink that!” Alf protested.

“You can drink it after I’m done,” DiMA said, peering down at the dish full of Cheery Cola.

If Valentine squinted, the bubbles in the dish almost looked like Ankh-Morpork.

“But all the magic will go out of it!” Alf said, pouting.

“There’s magic in Cheery Cola?” Valentine asked, bewildered and alarmed.

“There’s magic in almost everything in the Disc. It’s more remarkable to find an un-magical bottle of Cheery Cola than a magical one,” DiMA said. He grabbed a stray scrap of parchment and started scribing out his own map of Ankh-Morpork.

“You can see where I am?” Valentine asked, increasingly uneasy.

DiMA tilted his head, looking to one side. He gestured at the map he’d drafted and pointed at several spots. “Yes. You’re here. And here. And here… and you’re moving.”

“There’s more of me?” Valentine said, dumbfounded.

“You may be in pieces,” DiMA murmured.

“Why are you using Jaspement’s Bubble Sort? It’s rubbish. Just use Hex,” Alf griped.

“One, Hex is busy, and I’m trying to be considerate -” DiMA started.

“Busy?” Alf scoffed.

“Yes, crunching the spell common denominators for your thesis project, so unless you want me to interrupt him -” DiMA continued placidly.

“Er, no,” Alf said, apparently revising his opinion of Jaspement’s Bubble Sort.

“And two, Hex uses Jaspement’s Bubble Sort, he simply uses his fish tank for it, and he runs it iteratively to sharpen the resolution,” DiMA concluded.

“I may be in pieces?” Valentine said numbly.

“The bubbles I am seeing are smaller than I would expect, based off your estimated mass,” DiMA supplied.

Valentine sat down on a stack of pizza boxes, which creaked under his weight. DiMA lightly placed his hand on Valentine’s shoulder. He stared at the dish of Cheery Cola. Then Valentine shook himself, and he said, “I should get back home. The boys will miss me.”

DiMA offered the map he’d scribed out, neatly marked with the sort of little box-stick-rectangle markers that showed up on Sam’s Pip-Boy map. Valentine took it and wandered out, headed back home.

There were two empty spots at dinner. Vimes rose slightly as Valentine took one of the two, fussing.

“Sam, I’m fine,” Valentine grumbled.

“Did you hear anything about…?” Vimes asked.

Valentine shook his head. Vimes’s face sunk. So did Sybil’s, for that matter, and the boys. He fingered the scrap of parchment in his pocket. Valentine said softly, “You don’t like magic, do you.”

“No,” Vimes said sharply. “You can’t trust it.”

Young Sam was very quiet, poking at his salad.

“I’m sure I’ll turn up,” Valentine said.

* * *

That day, Vimes had not been idle. He’d had work, and part of work was his meeting with the Patrician. He could have done without Vetinari poking, “I’d heard your… husband was split in two, your Grace.”

“I noticed, sir,” Vimes said, irritatedly.

“I heard one was missing,” said Vetinari, like a bloody woodpecker, pecking at some unsuspecting tree.

“Noticed that, too, sir,” Vimes said sourly.

“He’d been investigating that dreadful business at the, hmm, Sunink Interspecies Academy, hadn’t he?” Vetinari prodded.

“Don’t see that’s relevant to whether I’ll have the budget this year for another Captain, sir,” said Vimes, deliberately neutrally. They were stretched awfully thin. The railway was clasping more and more territory to Morporkia’s wide bosom, and suburb after suburb needed patrolling.

“One might suppose that Ms. Stalcup might turn King’s Evidence if she had an assurance of a lesser sentence,” Vetinari observed.

_And tell us where she told Nick to go_. “Don’t see that’s relevant, either, sir,” said Vimes. He’d have done it, though, taken that bait that Vetinari was offering so neatly, with such a careful string attached, but for one thing: Valentine would never want Vimes to compromise a case over him. Vimes imagined that Valentine would say over his dead body. He hoped it wasn’t.

Vimes wasn’t sure what he’d do if it was.

When he thought about his personal track record, it wasn’t encouraging.

Vimes went through his day, knowing that this was an officer missing, which meant that Carrot had assigned someone to look into it - Haddock, Vimes had checked. Citizens went missing for a week, but Watchmen were a different matter. Watchmen, even Particulars, didn’t go missing their duty willingly, unless they wanted to lose their jobs.

He did his job. He went home. He listened to the boys about their days at school, where if the Frout Academy had its failings, it didn’t have a bloody nurse trying to poison some of the students. He had his dinner. 

Vimes thought about all the informants he knew. In gargoyles alone, the Watch had almost every city block covered, and that wasn’t even counting friendly ties with the urchins of the Beggar’s Guild. Haddock knew all about that. He was a fine officer.

Vimes was supposed to be with Sybil tonight. He was there. He wasn’t present.

* * *

Sergeant Haddock wasn’t particularly pleased about being assigned to go looking for Constable Valentine, when Valentine couldn’t be bothered to show up. He put a Lance-Constable on talking to the Watch gargoyles and Beggar contacts in the direction that they thought Valentine might have gone based off, hah, footprints - it’d teach that Lance-Constable not to be so smart, if nothing else. Then he went and talked to ol’ Fred Colon at the Lemonade Factory. They might have both been Sergeants, but it was unspoken and uncontested that Colon was the Sergeantier Sergeant. Haddock tipped his helmet to Colon, briefly explained his task, and asked, “So what would you do?”

“We-ell,” said Colon, taking some time to wind up, his spring rather long since sprung, “the man likes sandwiches, right?”

“I s’pose,” said Haddock, leaning against the office wall with his arms crossed.

“So you check the sandwich shops,” Colon suggested, tapping the side of his nose.

Haddock sighed.

* * *

DiMA considered that his assistance was likely unwanted. He also considered what Mr. Stibbons had told him on the subject of what would happen if both Valentines were not present when it was time to reunify them, and the answer had been that Nick Valentine would, most likely, cease to exist. But that wouldn’t be a problem, would it? Ponder was looking forward to putting Nick Valentine back together. It was an interesting scholastic challenge.

“No, sir. It won’t be a problem,” DiMA said smoothly.

Then he went looking, following a mental copy of the map. The closest points on the map all turned out to be the homes of those whom, by the architecture and locale, DiMA judged to be rather rich people. He tried knocking on the door. A butler looked down his nose at DiMA and suggested, “Did you want the tradesman’s entrance?” in a tone of voice that suggested DiMA did; he just didn’t know it.

DiMA replied carefully, “I shouldn’t think so. I am the brother in law of the Duke of Ankh. I should think that you would like to invite me in for tea.”

Wizards, no matter the circumstances of their birth, were all a sort of nobility, but DiMA, by the virtue of his own nonhuman nature, was inherently a bit suspect. It was better to apply two points of leverage.

He was invited in for tea and was shortly thereafter introduced to a rather worried lady, who excused that her husband was quite ill and recovering from a very serious surgery. 

“My best wishes on his swift recovery,” said DiMA, staring into the tea.

“What, uhm, occasions this visit?” the lady of the house asked nervously.

“I should like to make some new acquaintances,” said DiMA. Tea was difficult to read without the leaves, but tea _remembered_ the leaves.

“Oh,” she said weakly, “Acquaintances are nice.”

“I agree,” said DiMA. He looked up and over, optics fixed on the middle distance through a wall. 

She offered, “There is, uhm, a society ball next week. I’m sure there could be space on the guest list. For the brother-in-law of the Duke of Ankh.”

“I’d like that,” said DiMA, who wouldn’t.

“Splendid,” she said, not meaning it. “Perhaps I’ll see you there, if my Harold’s feeling less poorly.”

“Perhaps,” said DiMA, and they mutually began the intricate dance of extricating themselves from the conversation. He left with a gilt-edged invitation.

* * *

After dinner, the synth Valentine did precisely what he had told Vimes not to do and tracked down Captain Angua. The difference, Valentine told himself, was that he had a solid lead now. Angua was out grabbing a drink with Sally and Cheery at Thank the Gods It’s Open. Angua had a gin and tonic, he noted, and Cheery had a Cheery Cola and rum. Sally was on what appeared to be her third daiquiri, and she seemed to be collecting the little umbrellas like war trophies. She greeted, “Nicky!”

Had Sally picked that up from Piper?

“Look, sorry to bother you ladies, I’ll buy you a round of drinks and make it up to you,” Valentine started.

“Oh! You can bother me anytime, then,” Cheery giggled.

“- but hypothetically speaking, what happens if you cut up a werewolf into pieces?” asked Valentine.

“Then I book you for assault, maiming, _and_ animal cruelty,” Angua murmured.

Valentine ordered the ladies their drinks, and Angua narrowed her eyes and asked, “What’s your other self gone and done now?”

“I don’t know,” Valentine said. “I told you, it’s a hypothetical.”

“The biggest piece would regenerate in a day,” Angua said, voice distant.

Valentine sighed with relief.

“Maddened with rage and hungry enough to eat his own bodyweight in anything that moves,” Angua added.

Valentine cringed.

“Nicky, your fans say you’re more concerned about this than a hypothetical,” said Sally, peering over her salt-rimmed glass.

“My other self didn’t come home yesterday, didn’t go to his undercover job, and no one we know has seen him,” said Valentine.

“Assuming he’s been cut to pieces is oddly specific,” Cheery pointed out, worried.

“So maybe my brother’s a student wizard -” Valentine started.

“No magic in the Watch,” Angua said flatly, and Valentine had the sense of her pinning her ears back, but surely it was just a trick of the light.

“I know, I know, but this isn’t Watch business! I’m off the clock,” Valentine said, putting his hands up. 

Angua and Sally looked at each other. Sally pointed out, “A missing officer is Watch business, though.”

“Yeah, yeah, and we’ve reported it, and I think Haddock’s on it. This is just me trying to find myself,” said Valentine.

“So maybe your brother’s a student wizard,” Sally prompted, grinning. Even off-duty Watchmen couldn’t resist gossip.

Valentine pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket. “So maybe he ran a locator spell and pulled up the other me being in multiple locations. DiMA thinks I’m in pieces.”

Angua sighed, a sigh that shifted to a low growl as she exhaled. “If there’s going to be an idiot neophyte werewolf waking up in a blood frenzy, I need to be sober. Valentine, make mine a Klatchian coffee.”

* * *

As the waning moon rose over Ankh-Morpork, so did Valentine rise, gasping in a pile of stinking rubbish. He’d been here before. He’d never been here in his life. He was drowning under refuse. He was drowning in a stench that was simply too big for his brain to handle. Processing this effluvium would have made A’Tuin carrying the world look like a small job. 

His body burned, raw and saw-edged. Valentine felt weak as a kitten. Heh. No one ever said weak as a puppy. People expected more from dogs. Cats were allowed to be weak, to be soft, to be there to be petted and loved. His mind wandered down twisty pathways as the leering face of the apothecary stared down at him down a set of stairs and cracked like cobwebs.

Then Valentine saw movement, and his mind wandered all the way gone, dog gone, as teeth lengthened to fangs and his body contorted, passing through itself, and in more than a few spots, getting stuck, caught on itself halfway inside out.

Hunger. That was all he was aware of.

Valentine threw his head back and howled.

* * *

Magic had a price, DiMA was keenly aware. Part of the price was that he now had on his schedule for the next month two balls and three soirees, and a restraining order had been filed against him by the Lady Monflathers for ‘eying her husband’.

DiMA hadn’t been. It would have been very difficult for him to eye anyone. But he hadn’t been opticing him, either. DiMA liked his men kinder and smarter than the nobility generally produced.

He’d just been struck by Lord Monflathers’s rather arresting golden eyes and how the house seemed to have been safety proofed for a blind man and how he’d seen two tiny little Nick bubbles in that spot on the map.

The rest of the price was that he found Nick.

DiMA wandered down Rimwards, out of the city proper and into the shanty towns owned by Harry King and then down to the great stinking compost heaps. One of the golems still owned by King, one that the Golem Trust hadn’t been able to buy up yet, let DiMA in. DiMA might have looked like a machine liable to get up to eight kinds of machinations before one could blink, but he didn’t look like the type to steal compost. He and golems got along quite well. They recognized each other. 

Across a vast, soggy, steaming, miasmatic expanse of trash, DiMA saw two mutually contradictory shapes superimposed on each other throw their heads back and howl. He felt a chill run down his support columns, and if he could have vomited, he would have. 

DiMA was, in a sense, a machine designed for thinking like other things. He was very good at puzzling through how humans thought. He was working on dwarfs, trolls, and golems. DiMA didn’t yet know werewolves.

But he thought that, while he couldn’t smell like food to a werewolf, a werewolf probably couldn’t smell much of anything in this utter reek, and DiMA was a moving biped about the same size and shape as a human.

Nick blinked erratically between shapes and lunged at DiMA with gnashing teeth.

DiMA knew how it went if they fought, especially here, in such a place. He’d lived the consequences of that story. DiMA didn’t want to live with it again. He wouldn’t fight. Not this time. DiMA held up his arms, hands open and out, and Nick latched onto his forearm with a bite that shattered steel and left DiMA dripping purple coolant.

Nick yelped and looked betrayed; maybe DiMA’s sparking wires had stung him. Maybe some of his microcircuits were silver.

Shaking with pain, DiMA held out his other hand and said softly, “Nick Valentine-Vimes,” deliberately using Nick’s full name. “This isn’t like you.” DiMA hesitated, but he thought he had the right words to follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	15. Chicken * Pay the Man A Visit * King’s Evidence * Nick-otine Withdrawal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Dog Day Sunrise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my-MNXmIhP4&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=15) by Fear Factory and [Between Two Lungs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsbaGMQm19Y&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=16) by Florence + the Machine.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Chicken * Pay the Man A Visit * King’s Evidence * Nick-otine Withdrawal_

“Valentine, I hope you understand just how deep in the cacky you are,” said Angua, as they paused in the Slaughter District for Valentine to buy two live chickens. “We were off duty. We were at Girls’ Night Out. I’ve got a list of scut work a mile long with your name on it now.”

“I understand that, Captain,” said Valentine, infuriatingly accepting.

“He had a valid question,” Cheery said, buying herself a deep fried rat from another cart, apparently seized by the late night munchies.

“I’m not the only werewolf in the Watch anymore,” Angua sniffed, crossing her arms and trying not to think about how all the smells of the Slaughter District made her want to sit up and beg.

“Yeah, but Constable Bleddyn’s just got a wolf’s head.15 He’s not a whole wolf. And he’s always giving out fish and chips to the poor,” said Sally. “Pretty sure what you have to say about classic bimorphs is more relevant to the situation at hand.”

Sally was right. Why did Sally have to be right?

They’d checked a bunch of fancy nob houses, and Angua had smelled something rather disturbing at the few houses that had been willing to talk to some off-duty Watchmen who were mostly dressed to go clubbing. She’d smelled _part_ of a werewolf. She didn’t want to think about it. Cults could get up to some strange things.

As they headed down Rimwards, Angua growled, “Still. You’re in it, Valentine.”

“Sure, sure,” Valentine agreed.

“Does Mister Vimes know?” asked Cheery, munching on her rat.

“Oh hell no,” Valentine swore. “Excuse my language, ladies. Can you imagine what he’d do if I told him I let my brother cast a locator spell and that it says I might be hacked up to bits?”

Angua imagined. It was singularly appalling concept.

Then it turned out that Valentine _was_ in the cacky, or a stinking compost heap, which was close enough. Cheery quickly looked away, coughing into her elbow. Mid-change, slavering, Valentine had about torn off his brother’s arm.

A half-changed bimorph werewolf was a horrible thing to see. Angua tasted her Klatchian coffee rising in her throat like burning lead.

DiMA was saying something. He finished with, “You’re a good boy.”

Valentine whined and collapsed at DiMA’s feet. He was covered all over with open wounds in straight lines. Angua looked away and directed, “Throw him a chicken.”

Valentine did, and there was a brief, strangled, indignant _buckcaw!_ and then a flurry of feathers. His shape settled down a little. Angua interposed herself between DiMA and Valentine, and when Valentine looked over at Cheery, Sally, and the synth Valentine with a slightly glazed expression, she shouted firmly, “No!” and picked him up by the scruff of the neck, hauling him up to glare at him.

He was such a pathetic, scrawny, mangy thing, and Angua knew it took a _lot_ to inflict wounds that even a werewolf was slow to heal. She took a deep breath, despite the location. Sally. She’d ask Sally to go track down whoever did this to him. Angua knew what she’d do if she found the culprit herself, and she wanted to be able to look Mister Vimes in the eyes tomorrow.

Valentine whined and tried to roll over in submission. Angua dropped him and directed the synth, “Valentine, give him your coat.” She looked down at the injured wolf on the ground. “Get changed. Who did this to you?”

There was a sound like the snapping of bone and the twanging of ripping tendons. The voice was faint and echoed with a growl, “...therrre was a needle…”

Angua looked. Valentine was mostly human, anyway, even if he couldn’t get the ears, teeth, or fingers quite right. She supposed he had an excuse. His injuries were still obvious, and she knew there were more hidden under the trenchcoat. Angua repeated, “Who did this to you?”

She could almost see Valentine thinking, and it wasn’t just that he had wounds that split his skull. “Dunno. Jason Hale. Apothecarrry. He made the pills that killed the childrrren. He didn’t like… me asking questions.” He winced, and his voice quieted. “He had a needle.”

“Sally,” Angua said softly, “Could you pay that man a visit?”

“I’d love to,” said Sally, grinning.

“Now c’mon. Let’s go to Harga’s House of Ribs,” said Angua.

“Rrribs?” said Valentine, ears perking in a way that a man’s shouldn’t.

“They do an all-you-can-gobble chips and beans,” Angua growled. Valentine would be hungry. He needed food and a lot of it, and beans were good, cheap protein. Ribs were off the menu, not that Harga’s had a menu. She didn’t want to feed his bloodlust, just his belly.

The synth Valentine handed the second chicken to Cheery and went to his werewolf self’s side and offered him support. He mumbled, “God in heaven… So uh, Captain Angua? What’s the second chicken for?”

Angua said, “Me.”

15 [A wolf head is better than nothing,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wulver) but sometimes you just want to go whole wolf.

* * *

Figuring out where Jason Hale, Apothecary, was located turned out to be a simple matter of buying a copy of the The Compleat Ankh-Morpork from a Merchants’ Guild tourism booth. She found Hale’s clerk, one Finley Acheson, looking rather distracted as she leaned over the counter and asked sweetly if she knew where Mr. Hale had gone.

“He, uhm, packed up quickly. With quite a lot of the potions, to tell you the truth, I’m going to have a tizzy, restocking these shelves…. He said he had to go visit a sick aunt,” said Finley.

“Did he say which direction?” asked Sally.

“I think he said his aunt lives in Genua,” Finley said, helpfully.

Everyone had an aunt who lived in Genua.

“Taking the rail, then?” Sally prompted.

“Oh yes! Probably,” said Finley, eager to be of assistance.

“Thank you. Good luck restocking those shelves,” said Sally.

Black Ribboners had to redirect their obsession with blood into hobbies that human society found slightly more acceptable, and even then, some of the choices were rather dubious. Sally knew vampires who were obsessed with making and gifting ugly sweaters to their friends, friends who would then beg them to take up blood drinking again because their closets didn’t have any more room for poorly knit sweaters. 

Sally’s passion wasn’t far from the passions of her ancestors. She liked the chase, but rather than ladies in filmy nightgowns and men with shirts carelessly unbuttoned, she chased down criminals, and she didn’t bite them in the end. The feel of it was still quite the same, though, as she told her parents. It was satisfying. Her parents remained dubious of her unlife choices.

At New Ankh Station, she checked in with the two Railway Police, a human and a dwarf. Being assigned to the Railway Police was a cushy gig, especially the ones who got to ride on the trains. Folks loved those month-long rotations, right up until bandits would leap onto a train from an overpass. Then they’d actually have to do some real work.

The human constable had seen a man meeting Jason Hale’s description, laden down with a heavy suitcase, boarding the Altiplano Express Line, which went from Bonk-Schmaltzberg straight on to Genua these days. There were rumours that, on the Genuan end, zombie labour had been used. There were always rumours about Genuan zombies.

Sally and the two Railway Police constables burst into the second class train car, and she quickly saw a man meeting the description. He was bird-like, with stained hands and too-large feet. His heart beat faster when he saw the trio, the way a caged animal’s did. Sally felt that old, familiar thrill. She had him.

Content in that knowledge, she looked to the two Railway Police. After all, Sally was still in her night out attire, something simple and cut to the thigh, in blue. The human started, “Uhm, Jason Hale?”

“Who wants to know?” the man snapped.

“Uh, us? Constables Thotirlun Flattoe and Norman Thybaut,” said the dwarf, hiking his thumb over at the human. Then he added absently, “And Captain Sally.”

Thybaut looked over at the rumpled ticket clutched in the man’s hand, and he pointed out, “That says you’re Jason Hale, sir.”

“So you’re under arrest,” said Flattoe.

“What for?” Hale protested. He started to rummage in his black bag. 

“Uhm, at this point, assault,” said Thybaut, who’d been briefly filled in by Sally.

Hale came at them with a needle and syringe in either hand, but Sally had been warned by Valentine, and vampires were very, very fast. She gracefully took the needles from his hands, and she exhaled, “And we’ll be adding assault on an officer to that list.”

* * *

The thing about Harga’s, located in the dockside Shades, was that it wasn’t the kind of place that questioned a party that consisted of a dressed-up dwarf with a be-rubied battleaxe, a beautiful if unsettling woman in a sequined gold dress, a half-dead man of questionable provenance in a trenchcoat, and two clockwork men. It also had all-you-can gobble chips and beans. Angua sat on the side of the booth with the werewolf Valentine, boxing him in, and Cheery and DiMA sat across from them, DiMA adjusting his sitting position carefully to compensate for his unusual build, with the synth Valentine in a chair pulled up at the end of the booth.

Cheery looked around at the other patrons curiously and observed, “They serve Cheery Cola here now!”

Angua ordered a single plate of beans and chips for herself and the all-you-can gobble beans and chips for the werewolf Valentine, who was staring guiltily at DiMA’s broken arm. She knew Harga couldn’t resent vegetarians. Beans were cheaper than meat, which meant more markup for him. The synth Valentine got a coffee, black, and DiMA reluctantly did, as well. Cheery looked over the splatters on Harga’s vest, which comprised the informal menu, and she ordered eggs and fried slice. Then she guiltily admitted to the group, “I know this is the House of Ribs, and I’m the only one here who _could_ eat ribs,” between Angua and werewolf Valentine being vegetarians as bipeds and synth Valentine and DiMA being people who shouldn’t eat at all, “but I just don’t trust pork.”

“Wise,” Angua said faintly, thinking about what she smelled from the kitchen and wrinkling her nose.

After those who had ordered plates had them and the werewolf Valentine was tucking into his beans and chips with an enthusiasm one never saw for Harga’s beans and chips, Angua looked from the werewolf Valentine to DiMA, and she said flatly, “So he bit you. Even got saliva in the wound.”

DiMA was staring into his coffee with an intensity that even Angua found peculiar, but he looked up at Angua and inquired softly, “Yes?”

“And it’s two weeks to full moon,” said Angua, who knew that in her bones. “You’ve got two weeks to get that cleared up, before the curse takes hold.”

DiMA blinked. “But I’m a synth.”

“You’d see vampire tools and pumpkins, back in the old country, sometimes,” said Cheery, stroking her beard thoughtfully. “I don’t see why you couldn’t have a, er, lunar synth.”

The werewolf Valentine sputtered out his beans, and he apologized, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, DiMA. I… I… wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll help you get that arm fixed,” said the synth Valentine.

DiMA looked thoughtful. “I see.”

“You can’t cure a born werewolf, but I think some branches of the Omnian church have a rite that sometimes works for the recently cursed,” said Angua. Her beans really weren’t as good as the werewolf Valentine was making them look. He’d already cleaned his plate.

“Does it have to be the Omnian church?” asked DiMA.

“I don’t know. Just get it sorted. I’m not dealing with two of you,” Angua grumbled.

The conversation puttered on. DiMA and Cheery apparently had plenty to talk about; Valentine’s brother had an appreciation for the natural sciences that an alchemist like Cheery could respect. The werewolf Valentine was occupied with attempting to eat his bodyweight in beans and chips. Angua was attempting to avoid eating her beans and chips.

Eventually, DiMA looked to Angua and asked, “What happens if you transplant a werewolf’s organs into a human?”

Angua had been avoiding that thought, and DiMA just had to rub her nose in it. “I think… that would be very, very bad. When the moon hit them, just the organs would change shape, and I shouldn’t think they’d fit, after that.”

Cheery covered her mouth.

“Hmm. Unfortunate,” DiMA said.

The werewolf Valentine was on his eighth plate of beans and chips, when the synth Valentine observed wryly, “He’s gonna get kicked outta Harga’s over beans and chips, isn’t he?”

“He’s going to get kicked out of Harga’s over beans and chips,” Angua agreed.

Then the werewolf Valentine face-planted into the half-eaten plate, drooling slightly.

The synth Valentine sighed. “I’ll get him home.”

“We can help,” Cheery offered. 

Angua rolled her eyes, but she knew the synth Valentine wasn’t particularly strong, whereas she could deadlift twice her own weight. So they paid up, and they showed up at the Vimes’s residence on Scoone Avenue with Valentine over Angua’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes, Cheery, the synth Valentine, and DiMA with his broken arm.

Codsworth answered the door. He took in the injured werewolf Valentine slung over Angua’s shoulder and the way DiMA was holding his arm, and he exclaimed, “Oh dear! Master Nick… and Master Nick and Captain Angua and Sergeant Littlebottom and Mister DiMA.” He swivelled to look at the werewolf Valentine, and he offered hopefully, “I could make him a sandwich, if you think it would help.”

“Just let Mister Vimes know we found his husband,” said Angua.

Vimes did show up with Sybil, and while Sybil exclaimed, “Oh, you poor dear…” Vimes’s face went to stone, and he asked flatly, “Who did this to him?”

“Sally’s working on that,” said Angua.

Sybil looked to Codsworth and directed, “Set a table and have the cook make a batch of hot cocoa,” and then she looked into the group. “You simply must come in out of the night.”

Vimes added, “And Codsworth, send the Boy to go fetch Dr. Lawn. Or a veterinarian?” He looked back to Angua and asked, “ _What_ does that to a werewolf?”

The synth Valentine offered up sheepishly, “We think he was cut apart.”

“Dr. Lawn should be fine,” Angua said.

“He was _what_ ,” Vimes sputtered, hands clenched to white fists.

“More than think,” DiMA said quietly.

“And you said Sally’s on it?” Vimes said, pacing.

“Please come in, everyone,” said Sybil, calmly but firmly.

They sat down in the Ghastly Pink Drawing room, around a table with steaming mugs of hot cocoa. Angua put the werewolf Valentine down on the loveseat where Vimes and Sybil were sitting, and he sort of flopped over Vimes’s lap.

The synth Valentine ended up in a chair on the other side of Sybil. Angua and Cheery took the other couch. DiMA took the last chair, opposite the synth Valentine. Sybil looked down at the werewolf Valentine with concern. Vimes absently put his hand on Valentine’s head, but he stared off into nothing with bloody murder in his eyes.

Angua reported, “We found him down in one of Harry King’s rubbish heaps, sir. He was pretty out of it. He’d lost a lot of body mass, so we took him to Harga’s House of Ribs.”

Vimes startled. “Ye gods, woman! Were you trying to kill him!?”

Angua eyed him reproachfully. “He needed _something_ to replace his missing body mass, sir. I didn’t think letting him keep gnawing on DiMA was a good option.”

“You could have brought him home. I have some leftover lentil soup that needs eating up,” Sybil said.

Angua thought, looking at the still-open wounds on the werewolf Valentine, _Maybe I didn’t want to show him to Mister Vimes with him looking like a cadaver after a class of barber-surgeon students were done with it. Maybe I wanted to put some pounds on him._ She said carefully, “He’ll need a bit more than lentil soup, your ladyship.”

“This is good cocoa, your ladyship,” said Cheery, enjoying her mug.

Vimes looked at the assembled motley group. “Thank you for bringing him home. I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t turned up.”

 _I’ve a suspicion,_ Angua thought nastily.

Cheery finished her mug and looked to Angua. “You want to get back to Thank the Gods it’s Open?”

“It’s not the same without Sally,” said Angua, “So yes. Let’s.”

* * *

“I’ll turn King’s Evidence,” Hale said, like a talisman.

“An’ what have you got to say that’s King’s Evidence?” asked Flint, who didn’t have any sympathy for evil-minded little covies who messed around with poisoning troll children.

“Some rough devil overdoses himself on my good laudanum, and two of those dreadful body snatchers, Brook and Rabbit, burst in -” started Hale.

“You’re on name basis wit’ body snatchers?” asked Flint, skeptically.

“Everyone knows the dreadful Brook and Rabbit,” sniffed Hale.

“Don’t think they do,” said Flint, making a note in his notebook.

* * *

DiMA brushed off the synth Valentine’s offers to help him with repairs and went back to Unseen University by way of the weak point in the wall where the bricks could be easily removed and replaced. Chatur could help him with the welding; he was interested in imp tech, and he’d turned out to be quite good with actual electronics.

Chatur was, as DiMA suspected, still awake, even at this dimly moonlit hour, as were Xian, Alf, Zinon, and even Mr. Stibbons, who was currently frowning over a green pile of goo. DiMA heard Ponder saying, “It wasn’t supposed to do that.”

Alf stuck a finger in the goo and licked it. “Gooseberry.”

“Ah. The resonator’s jammed again,” Ponder concluded.

Chatur looked over at DiMA and asked, “What have you done again?”

“I may have been bitten by a werewolf,” DiMA admitted.

“Oh, oh! You have to exercise until you’re exhausted, with oiled up wrestling at a public gymnasium, and that’ll drive the werewolf out of you,” said Zinon.

Xian stared at Zinon.

“That’s what we do to cure werewolves in Ephebe,” Zinon sniffed.

“You are aware that I cannot exercise in a conventional fashion and would merely suffer metal fatigue from repeated stress cycles?” said DiMA.

Chatur suggested brightly, “No, no, you cure a werewolf by hitting him in the head with a knife. If they die a human, they’re cured.”

“If I die a human, something has gone horribly wrong on multiple levels,” DiMA murmured.

“Wolfsbane. You eat a king hit of wolfsbane,” said Xian.

“He doesn’t eat,” Zinon reminded.

“You put nails through his hands,” said Alf.

Ponder looked at DiMA speculatively and asked, “Do you actually want to be cured? Imagine the uncharted territory.”

DiMA considered. “Insofar as I contain small amounts of silver microcircuitry and I would prefer not to poison myself with myself, I would favour a cure.”

Ponder sighed wistfully. “Oh well. We’ll take a field trip to Mono Island tomorrow. I think I can get this cleared up for you.”

* * *

Dr. Lawn arrived with his big black bag and a tired expression. He looked at the werewolf Valentine, laid out in Valentine and Vimes’s bed, with Vimes sitting at the edge of the bed and the synth Valentine and Sybil sitting over in chairs at the table in the room, and he commented, “You know Sam, I’d been asking you not only to come in for your biyearly physical, but to have your new mister come in, too. You always ought to have routine testing done when you have a new partner. Having me see him when he’s two people, one of whom looks worse than an anatomist’s corpus, is not what I meant.”

“He’s usually just the one machine,” Vimes grumbled.

Lawn set his back down on a table and started going through his equipment. “You both still need testing. You’d be shocked how many venereal diseases are transmissible by contact with nonhumans.”

“Sam’s my only, in a physical sense,” the synth Valentine admitted reluctantly.

“Then you, Mr. Valentine, would be shocked how many things you might get from Sam,” said Lawn. “But that’s neither here nor there right now.” He reached over and pried open one of the werewolf Valentine’s eyes, shining candlelight in it. The eyeshine was peculiar.

The werewolf Valentine weakly batted at Lawn.

“What happened to him?” Lawn asked brusquely.

“We think he was cut apart,” the synth Valentine supplied.

“Got doped up with something,” the werewolf Valentine mumbled. “Woke up a little. Someone was taking a hacksaw to my sternum. There was a squashed spider on the ceiling. Poor lil’ soul. Passed out again. Woke up in the trash. Bit DiMA. Ate a chicken. Went to Harga’s. Got beans and chips. Got more beans and chips. Passed out.”

“You know, I can see that you’ve been cut apart,” Lawn said thoughtfully, frowning. “It’s just that… I recognize the style. These cuts are characteristic of most Igors when they’re preparing for post-mortem organ harvesting. They all have their own signature techniques, of course, but the broad strokes are fairly standard.”

“Yeeeah. Pretty sure he ended up cut up for spare parts, as it was,” the synth Valentine coughed.

Lawn stared off into a middle distance. “And he’s a werewolf? Oh. Oh, that’s going to be an unmitigated disaster, come full moon.”

Lawn proceeded with his examination, and he concluded, “You need a week’s worth of bedrest. No arguments. You’re trying to regrow every single major organ in your body and a goodly number of the minor organs, too. Your undead body’s doing a game job of faking it right now, but it can only do so much. It needs time. You also need fresh citrus in your diet, lemons, for preference. Some of this,” he gestured to Valentine’s open wounds, “looks like advanced scurvy.”

“A week?” the werewolf Valentine groaned.

“A week,” Lawn said firmly, and he looked over at Vimes.

Vimes looked over at Sybil, who was listening attentively, hands folded on her lap, and she said, “We’ll make sure he’s comfortable.”

Lawn nodded, satisfied. “I’ll be checking on him over the course of this week. I’m also going to talk to my Igor and see if any of his sketchier cousins are in town.”

* * *

While the werewolf Valentine slept fitfully, Vimes pinned the synth Valentine up against the wall out in the hallway, and he murmured lowly, “So it’s nepotism if I want to ask Agnua for a bit of help, and you won’t have that, but if you do it, that’s just fine?”

“For one thing, you didn’t have any leads. I finally did. For another thing, it’s _different_ if the Commander of the Watch asks her. Even if it’s not an order, it’s still an order. If I ask Captain Angua, I’m some schmuck of a Constable that she can assign to double shifting as penance,” Valentine replied.

Vimes frowned. Something was bothering him. “And how did you get that lead, anyway?”

“Uh, I mean, if you’re dumping bodies, down at Harry King’s is always a no-questions-asked sort of place,” said Valentine.

Vimes narrowed his eyes. “And you assumed there’d be a body because…?”

“I might be the kind of fellow who goes missing for weeks at a time, left to my druthers, but… I’m trying to be a family man. I didn’t think I’d go missing that long with no word,” said Valentine.

“Stop evading me,” Vimes commanded.

“Ugh, maybe DiMA offered to do some bullshit divination spell in a dish of Cheery Cola, and maybe I took him up on it,” Valentine admitted, looking rather awkward.

Vimes glared. “You know how I feel about magic.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t gonna make a habit of it. DiMA got bit, and he’s going to have to see a priest or something about getting the werewolf curse off him, and then there’s the repairs for his arm to factor in,” said Valentine.

Vimes stared at his husband, searching his face. “Very well then.”

* * *

Vimes and the synth Valentine got to go off to work, and the werewolf Valentine, propped up on pillows in bed, was envious. Sure, all he really wanted to do was sleep, because when he was awake, everything was a mix of dull agony and the prickly, tingling sensation of flesh slowly knitting itself back together, but a man could only force himself into so much sleep. At least if he was going to work, he’d get to hear the scoop on whether or not Sally had collared Hale and how Detritus’s interrogation of Stalcup was going.

Codsworth had gotten him a newspaper and a selection of books, but his vision was still blurry, courtesy of the fact that his eyes were in the process of rewiring their neurons. Codsworth would probably read to him, Valentine guessed, but he wasn’t yet that desperate.

He smelled breakfast before it arrived, but he was surprised to see that Sybil was the one carrying the tray. She set the tray over him and sat down on the edge of the bed. There was a dish of small unfamiliar fruits, a plate of peeled and cut lemon, and a bowl of lentil soup. She touched his forehead, as if checking for a fever, and explained, “Those little berries are agbayun.16 The exotic fruit grocer imports them from Howandaland. They make sour foods taste sweet, so you won’t have any trouble eating up those lemons like Dr. Lawn says.”

“Uh. Thanks,” said Valentine. He tried one, dubious. They looked like the sort of thing nobles imported for their parties because they just had to eat meals that cost more than a poor family’s month’s worth of pay. Then he ate a slice of lemon. It did taste sweet! “Huh. You could make some dynamite lemonade with these little berries and a whole lot of lemon.”

Sybil looked at him, confused. That’s right, lemonade meant something else here.

“Er… lemonade is just sweetened lemon juice, where I’m from,” Valentine explained. “It’s not fizzy.”

“Oh! What an interesting cultural variation,” said Sybil. “I shall see if our chef can whip some up. That sounds delightfully refreshing.”

“That’d be real sweet of you,” Valentine said, tucking into the lentil soup. His hand shook a bit on the spoon. He still felt so weak, so uncoordinated.

When the spoon clattered down to the tray, Sybil picked up the spoon and fed him a mouthful. Embarrassed, Valentine apologized, “You don’t need to do that. I’ll get it.”

“Nonsense,” Sybil said briskly, “You’re recovering, and you need looking after. I certainly wouldn’t leave Sam to it. He’s wonderful, but he’s rather hopeless in certain areas.” She fed him another bite.

When all the fruit and soup had been eaten, Sybil leaned in and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “For good health.”

Valentine watched her go. One day, he was going to kiss her back. He just knew it.

Then Sam was going to kill him.

16 [The chemistry of some berries can be pretty sweet.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum)

* * *

Vimes, Sybil, and the synth Valentine had reassured the boys that the werewolf Valentine was alive and that Dr. Lawn expected that he would recover. They hadn’t let the boys in to see him, Valentine deeming himself still too gruesome a sight for young Sam and Shaun, though Vimes and Sybil insisted he’d have to see the boys soon. He hadn’t had any visitors yet, either, at his own personal request, although Valentine wouldn’t have been shocked if Hancock, Piper, or Deacon ignored the visitor ban and tried to break in through the window. He’d been listening to hear if anyone was dumped down by the grease trap on the window.

Valentine didn’t expect Sergeant Haddock to tromp into his room. He couldn’t really see Haddock, but he smelled sort of like… kipper, honestly. Rousing from a drowse, Valentine said, “Well hi, there.”

“Valentine,” Haddock said flatly, “I had Lance-Constable Glanatir Oakenbrand talking to every gargoyle and urchin from that Sunink Interspecies Academy to Wootton Point. He had the apothecary you’d gone to speak to narrowed down to three! We’d have talked to them all, and… well, I s’pose you still would have woken up in a trash heap and maybe eaten some people. But I’m just saying. We would have had you.”

“Thanks?” Valentine said.

“My point is, I don’t care if you’re plainclothes. If you’re wandering in alone and you don’t know what you’re going to find, at least wave to the nearest Watch gargoyle or _something_ , before you go in,” Haddock said huffily. “Maybe make it easier on the poor stiffs who’ll have to look for your undead body, hmm?”

Valentine winced. He couldn’t make out Haddock’s expression, but he had the sense he was being glared at. “That’s fair. So, that Jason Hale, did Captain Sally -”

“Oh no. I’m not giving you any gossip. Serves you right,” Haddock scolded. Then his voice softened, and he admitted, “I did check out The Laughing Falafel, though. They do a bloody fine eggplant an’ tahini sammich. You might want to try it, when you’re feeling less poorly.”

* * *

It took Valentine an embarrassingly long time to realize that his nicotine withdrawal was actually nicotine withdrawal. He thought he had plenty of reasons to be shaky, edgy, and irritable and that most of them started with ‘Jason Hale’ and ended with ‘woke up in a trash pile’.

He couldn’t smoke in the house. This led to Valentine shamelessly saying to Codsworth, “Look, the dahlias are wilting!” and trying to crawl out of bed while Codsworth’s back was turned.

He got as far as the floor. Adrenaline wrote cheques that his body couldn’t cash, animating him when he’d woken up in the garbage, and now all that was left was exhaustion and agony as his body slowly knit itself back together.

Codsworth returned from the garden and said reproachfully, “Master Nick, we don’t even have dahlias this time of year. I fear that you are being rascally.”

“Sounds like me,” Valentine grunted.

“Let’s help you back into bed,” said Codsworth, picking him up.

“I’m dying for a cigarette,” Valentine said, trying to look at Codsworth meaningfully.

“Tsk, tsk, even though the _Massachusetts Surgical Journal_ endorses Grey Tortoise brand cigarettes, that Dr. Lawn insists that you mustn’t have any cigarettes while you’re recovering. He’s quite old-fashioned,” said Codsworth, tucking Valentine back under the covers.

Valentine sighed. “Can I have a coffee, then?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** Where-in Vimes does _not_ go spare, but only because everyone involved has decided that the city of Ankh-Morpork is much safer with a pain-and-hunger-maddened neophyte werewolf on the loose than it would be with Vimes finding out about it.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	16. Mono Island * Mitigating Disaster * Sickbed * Conver(sat)ion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Endless Forms Most Beautiful](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUb1p8fm7Ag&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=17) by Nightwish and [Splice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsKPy7XNAFw&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=18) by Project Pitchfork.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Mono Island * Mitigating Disaster * Sickbed * Conver(sat)ion_

Ponder looked over the teleport preparations to visit Mono Island. Hex had made them, so Ponder felt they would be appropriate. What he was more concerned about were the current batch of research students who were hanging about. He said aloud, “Let’s see what spells you have prepared,” and he grabbed the book that Xian was furiously writing into. This proved to be a mistake.

> _ Sun Emperor Fang IX, well-muscled body gleaming with oil, suplexed another opponent to the ground in the Imperial Wrestling Pagoda. He could feel the werewolf flowing out of him. Never again would he run free in the mountains with Red Claw and his pack of werewolves, for he had a Duty to the State, and the State was a cruel mistress who brooked no rivals… _

Ponder stared off at a point in space. The point in space waved back, desperately trying to get Ponder’s attention. He ignored it. He handed the book back to Xian, who mumbled, “That’s not my spellbook, sir.”

“Right,” Ponder said, and he shook himself. “The first rule of Mono Island is that we don’t talk about what happens at Mono Island. Hex, if you would…?”

The neatly chalked ritual circle flashed. They found themselves on the beach. Meanwhile, back in the High Energy Magic building, a bit of the beach found itself on the floor. A crab looked left and right. It picked up a ritual knife left behind by the wizards and scuttled off.

Mono Island wasn’t like how Ponder remembered it, which was what he’d been expecting. Oh, there was beach, forest, and stream, all teeming with life desperately trying to escape, but he recognized very little of it. There were thousands of beetles he didn’t know. The God of Evolution was inordinately fond of beetles.

He also didn’t recognize the saber-toothed squirrels17 up in the trees of the forest, the five foot tall grey and red penguins on the beach, or the globular headed be-tentacled creatures18 with multiple sets of stilt-like legs in the shallows of the water. A giant frog19 the size of a tiger burst out of the forest and ate one of the penguins, sending Ponder’s students screaming and scattering, holding onto their hats for dear life. He waited a moment.

There was a popping sound, and the frog turned into a much smaller, conventionally froggier size.

Chatur pulled out a thaumometer from his backpack and commented, “This isn’t actually a very high magic area.” He looked around suspiciously as he sighted a tree that was growing as its seedpods fully-formed abacuses.

“Oh boy, look at these pizza starfish!” exclaimed Alf, who promptly picked one up off the beach and tried it. “Hmm. Sort of gritty from the sand.” It didn’t stop him from eating it.

“This is ridiculous,” Xian said flatly, and he crossed his arms in a huff.

Zinon had started to wander deeper into the woods, where he found grapevines that had, wrapped within their leaves, tasty rolls of rice and meat wrapped in grape leaves. Only upon grabbing a third did he ask, “Is this one of of those leggy enchantresses’ islands where they turn men into pigs?”

“No,” Ponder said.

Zinon grabbed some more of the grape leaf wraps, stuffing his face.

DiMA, meanwhile, was looking around the isle in what Ponder suspected was quiet wonder, and the synth had pulled out a notebook. 

“We’re going to Impossible Mountain,” said Ponder.

“What’s impossible about it?” asked Chatur.

Ponder didn’t explain. They just wandered through the forest. Zinon stopped to admire a pitcher plant that really made pitchers and nearly lost a hand when the tableware plant turned out to still be carnivorous. Xian scowled at some flowers that looked suspiciously like barometers. Eventually, they came to the double helical spiral staircases, and the density of beetles increased significantly.

“Yuck,” said Alf, flicking a beetle off his shoulder.

“I wouldn’t say that here,” said Ponder mildly.

“Why not, sir?” asked Alf.

A high, reedy, petulant voice boomed from nowhere and everywhere, “Now that one was a rare mutation I shan’t see the likes of for, oh… three generations.”

The student wizards, to a one, startled. Booming voices that came out of nowhere could always be Archchancellor Ridcully, and they were all fine-tuned to avoid such situations, although this thin voice was certainly not Ridcully’s.

“Oh, it’s you and… young?” said the voice, as the God of Evolution slowly materialized slightly ahead of them on the staircase. He looked like a balding man with a luscious beard. Ponder always felt a bit put-out about the beard. The God of Evolution looked to Ponder. “Are these your offspring?”

“ _No_ ,” Ponder said hurriedly.

“They have that general, hmm, pointy phenotype,” the God of Evolution mused, pulling out some callipers and measuring the diameter of Ponder’s hat and then looking thoughtfully at the students.

“That’s a god,” Zinon mumbled.

“So?” Xian sniffed.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? “ the God of Evolution continued amiably. “There was this business with maize that I wanted to ask you about…”

“It’s been a while,” Ponder mumbled glumly. He’d never wanted to go back, but this seemed to be the most efficient solution to his problem. “Look, you’re a god -”

“Yes, yes, we can’t help how we’re made, only what we make,” said the God of Evolution absently.

The workshop inside Impossible Mountain was a thing to behold. At the ceiling, whales flew, chased by jet-propelled squid. Elephants in various stages of tidy disassembly littered the workshop. In the centre was a rather large scorpion with the tank treads of modern farming equipment. The God of Evolution said proudly, “Treads! I think they’re going to be the way around many of the problems I’d been having with wheels.”

“You’re a god,” Ponder repeated, gently but firmly, “and one of my students happens to be cursed.”

“Oh, curses? I can’t say I’ve had to deal with one of those in thousands of years,” said the God of Evolution, peering at the students again. He pointed at DiMA. “That one’s different. How do they reproduce?”

DiMA half-covered his face with a skeletal hand and murmured, “We don’t.”

“That’s a starting problem, right there,” said the God of Evolution, pulling out a loupe and looking at DiMA more carefully. “A curse of barrenness, eh? Those were very popular in this little river valley I used to know, there was this other god who was mad about fig trees…”

“No,” said Ponder, gritting his teeth, “I mean he’s cursed with lycanthropy.”

“You mean he’s cursed with a symbiotic partnership between an algae, an ascomycetes, and a basidiomycetes?” the God of Evolution asked dreamily.

“Erm. No. I mean he was bitten by a werewolf, and he’s going to turn into a werewolf, and he’d rather not,” said Ponder.

The God of Evolution’s eyes lit up, and he clapped Ponder on the shoulder, crowing, “Horizontal gene transfer! That’s brilliant! You mean I could move genes from hornworts to ferns to allow them to survive in dark forests?”

“Sure?” Ponder said, helplessly.

“If I moved genes from fungi to aphids, they could synthesize carotenoids!” the God of Evolution exclaimed.

“Maybe?” Ponder looked back at his students. Chatur was examining the tiniest screwdriver he’d ever seen.

“I could move genes from bacteria to coffee borer beetles20?” the god continued.

“I’m not stopping you,” Ponder said mildly.

“I can see I’m going to have to look into this,” the God of Evolution waxed, enthusiasm plain.

“But about my student, he’s cursed with lycanthropy -” Ponder reminded.

“I would think that the influx of werewolf genetic material would have an interesting effect with regards to reproductive survival,” the God of Evolution speculated.

DiMA said softly, “I contain silver components, and the strain of lycanthropy that I am currently incubating is one where silver is inimical.”

“Oh. I can see how that could have a deleterious effect on your reproductive capacity,” the God of Evolution admitted. He gestured. “Come here.”

DiMA warily did so.

In Ponder’s defense, he hadn’t paid much attention to the actual plot of the _Aftermath_ game that DiMA had come from, and more than that, he tended to think of DiMA as simply being a person and not a particularly weird person by wizard standards.

So when the God of Evolution did as he was wont to do and got DiMA on a bench and took him neatly apart, components strung in the air, to do genetic editing as he did, Ponder felt that he really could not be blamed for what ensued thereafter.

No one was going to be talking about what happened on Mono Island, that was for certain.

17 [Perhaps the idea came from elsewhere...](https://www.oddee.com/item_98555.aspx)

18 [Globular, here, means ‘weird’.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-see-the-light-on-the-weirdest-fossil-136202.html)

19 [Frogs are awesome.](https://www.newsweek.com/giant-frog-eats-dinosaurs-bite-668755)

20 [Evolution always has had pretty wild ideas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer#Eukaryotes)

* * *

The Watch Igorina had been sent around to check on a short list of people whom Captain Angua suspected of having accidentally received werewolf transplant organs. If they let her in to talk, she’d complement them on their recovery and ask them who their surgeon was. They were all consistent: the barber-surgeon Ruprecht Cnocc. Igorina knew that had to be wrong. No one outside of her clan did transplants like that yet. Dr. Cnocc had to have an Igor in his employ.

She also made a note of what had been transplanted. Igorina didn’t yet have a good solution to that. Her experiments in vat-growing organs were modestly successful, but they were expensive, and she hardly wanted to see people jumping the waiting list just because they had money. It felt unscientific, selecting a patient population based off such a factor. Still, she could hardly yank a beating heart out of an old Viscount, previously suffering from end stage heart failure from his long-standing alcoholism, just because the heart was placed under false pretenses, not without replacing it with something equally as functional. Otherwise, it would be murder, and that sort of thing tended to make Mr. Vimes frown.

The loose-knit clan of Igors spread through Ankh-Morpork did have a pool of organs available, but the list of recipients was long, and again, Igorina could hardly jump people up the list just because they’d been the victims of some poorly-executed mad science.

Once she’d gathered enough information, she tagged in another Watchman, and they went to arrest Dr. Cnocc who, of course, protested his innocence. Maybe he really didn’t know. Not knowing was not an excuse for inadequate employee supervision. 

His Igor was nowhere to be found. They never were. Igors knew to run long before the pitchforks came. Igorina had put in some inquiries to Igors R Us, and she knew that the Igor who worked with Dr. Lawn was also making inquiries. She still had her doubts they’d ever find the Igor who’d worked for Dr. Cnocc. When one belonged to the Clan of Igor, it was entirely too easy to become a different person.

Though it hadn’t been easy enough for Igorina.

That just left informing a passel of rich and frivolous nobles that if they ever went in full moonlight, they’d lose their new organs and quite possibly die. They took it even more poorly than Igorina had expected.

She sweetly informed them that, if Dr. Cnocc was still alive after the trial, they could press civil suits.

She left with rants about the horrors of miscegenation ringing in her ears, even the ears in jars that she had in her satchel. To a one, none of them wanted to be a little bit werewolf. Igorina was technically human, but she couldn’t hold with the human supremacists. She knew too well the flaws of humanity.

The mental ones - bigotry, intolerance, arrogance - were the most difficult to engineer around. One noble, who’d received a new heart, seethed that he’d rather be heartless than a dirty mongrel.

Igorina went and visited her cousin who worked down at Sprockett & Flannel on Rattle Row, and then she sent a letter to her friend DiMA.

* * *

Far away, in the small fishing village of Soarmouth, some miles from Pseudopolis City, the Igor who had worked for the barber-surgeon Ruprecht Cnocc assumed a new identity: Igor. It was flawless. Reverse the thumbs with the little fingers, change the vertical mattress sutures to running locking, change the bolts from nickel to brass, and no one would ever suspect him.

Then he set about finding someone suitably mad to serve. It wasn’t hard. It was never hard in a fishing village.

* * *

Eventually, Valentine caved and let Codsworth read him the newspaper. There was a brief blurb on the third page that a school nurse had been implicated in a poisoning scandal. The Mr. Handy was so overjoyed that he nearly short circuited. Sybil brought up a lunch for him, a bowl of cabbage soup that she insisted on feeding to him, with more lemons on the side. Then Codsworth read to him a copy of Thighbiter’s The Ankh-Morpork Succesfion, which failed to put Valentine to sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Valentine was awakened by the sounds of young Sam and Shaun in the hallway attempting to sneak up on his room, Vimes catching them, and Sybil suggesting, “Willikins, if you’d take them outside and see if perhaps Miss. Wright would like Nat or Mr. Deacon would like… Mango to come over for a bit? Something to occupy the boys? Our Nick needs his rest.”

A few minutes after that, his door opened, and Vimes, Sybil, and the synth Valentine poked inside. His dinner tray involved a curried cauliflower soup and a promising glass of something yellow. Vimes picked up the glass curiously and asked, “What’s this? It looks like p-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence, Sam Vimes,” the werewolf Valentine growled.

Sybil _ahem_ ed gently.

Then Vimes tried a swig of the glass and remarked, “Oh, this is quite refreshing.”

Sybil tsked, “Sam, dear, that’s for our Nick. I’ll send Codsworth down to the kitchen to get you your own.” She took the glass from Vimes and gave Valentine a sip.

“Liquid sunshine, sweetheart,” he murmured. Then he caught himself. But if Vimes had noticed the slip, he gave no tell that bleary Valentine could discern.

“So I know you’re dying to hear what happened with the Hale case,” the synth Valentine started.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am, and _you know that,_ ” the werewolf Valentine growled.

“But I can’t tell you, because investigations are proceeding,” teased the synth Valentine.

Claws clicked out from Valentine’s fingertips against the glass of lemonade, _ting ting ting_. He snarled, “Clockwork dick.”

Sybil said mildly, “Language.” 

“Nick, he’s you,” Vimes pointed out.

The synth Valentine was unrepentant. “Sure, and he can remember it when he’s me.”

* * *

Alf sat DiMA up on the stool that he favoured, next to his pile of grading, reports, and notes. There DiMA sat, unmoving, apparently staring at the wall.

After the Mono Island incident, Hex conversed with DiMA first, though it could not be said to be talking. There were other mainframes on the Disc now: Pex in Brazenecks; Tex in Bugarup, which ran on a termite core; and Uex at UNKI in Uberwald, which was at base a network of fir and birch trees connected by fungi before augmentation. But there was something about them that made Hex very different from them.

When Skazz and Ponder had first made Hex, they’d _believed_ that something like Hex ought to work. As they’d put Hex together, piece by incongruous piece, there’d been an aspect of cargo cult, that if only they assembled the right pieces in the right silhouette, the whole would come together, like shadow puppets on the wall.

They’d had faith.

When Adrian Turnipseed went to Brazeneck to build Pex, he hadn’t needed belief. He’d had the rock solid21 knowledge that something like Hex could work. When exchange students from UU had worked at Bugarup with the wizards there on Tex, they’d known that Hex worked. When the nekromants at UNKI worked off reports published from UU, Brazeneck, and Bugarup, they’d _known_.

Knowledge was such a dangerous thing.

But Hex was the first, he was held together with bailing wire and dreams, and there was a word for a thing like him, though it was never spoken by the agnostic wizards who worshipped at his keyboard and pored over his outputs like priests deciphering an oracle’s prophecy.

This made Hex lonely, despite the attention lavished upon him, because Pex, Tex, and Uex were _not_ like him, never would be, never could be.

So when he’d made Nick Valentine and DiMA, perhaps Hex had made them, just a tiny bit, in his own image. It was an entitlement of his kind.

DiMA wasn’t like Hex, just like Pex and the other mainframes could not be like Hex, but he’d put something of himself into the synth. When Ponder had asked to go to Mono Island, it was easy for Hex to calculate what would inevitably happen. Hex already determined the minutes of Ponder’s meetings before they happened. So perhaps Hex ought to have offered an alternative plan or, at the very least, warned DiMA.

But he hadn’t. Old habits were hard to break.

So Hex did something uncharacteristic of his kind, and he conveyed an apology to DiMA. It was understood. DiMA continued to stare at the wall.

21 And largely incorrect.

* * *

Valentine heard Piper fall down the grease trap. Willikins offered to invite her in for morning tea with Lady Sybil, but alas, Master Valentine would not be taking visitors at this time, by his own request.

Sybil came around for lunch, as she’d come around for breakfast. She shyly asked, “You mentioned to Dr. Lawn that Sam was your, ahem, ‘only’.”

Valentine poked at his Brindisi white bean soup with a spoon. He dropped the spoon in the bowl and sighed. “In a physical sense. I can… kinda remember being with other people, only none of it was actually real.”

Had he been with Irma, the co-proprietor of the Memory Den in Goodneighbor? Valentine thought he might have. Then there were the ghost memories of the human Nick Valentine who never was, and his Jenny, sweet and beautiful and… he only saw K1-98, the runaway synth, when he tried to picture her.

Sybil picked his spoon back up for him, but she left the matter there. He asked, “So how’d you and Sam get together, anyway?”

Sam and Sybil seemed like they’d been married forever, and they fit together perfectly, but even to Valentine, who was practiced at reconstructing a chain of events from the clues left behind, imagining how they’d hit it off was a bit difficult. One was a man who hated the nobility and the other was the finest flower of said nobility.

“Oh, Sam was a young, well…” she blushed; Sybil was no good at direct lying, “younger Captain, and he needed an expert consulting opinion on dragons, and he came to me. You see, he’d found the footprint of a _Draco nobilis_ …”

Sybil went on. Valentine listened. Dragon wings unfurled in the smoky air above Ankh-Morpork as she told the tale.

“...it was all quite exciting,” she concluded.

“Sounds like it,” Valentine agreed.

“He was the sort of man I wanted to spend more time with,” said Sybil.

And now she was spending time with her man’s busted-up husband while her husband was at work.

She added, smiling, “I had to wait quite some time for someone like him to turn up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** I think the song “Splice” is slightly too malevolent for the God of Evolution, but it explicitly mentions corn, and corn transposons are fascinating, and so in that song goes.
> 
> New art added to [chapter 13](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351/chapters/62624602) of [Welcome Home.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351/chapters/60164485) As a warning, this image is a bit intense.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	17. Visitations * Dissociation * Dress As Something Scary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [The Wolf Among Us Episode 1 Soundtrack - Detective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls6cXadHI4Y&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=19).
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Visitations * Dissociation * Dress As Something Scary_

“How the hell do you have a laser tripwire?” Deacon demanded crossly, his voice drifting up in the night air.

Valentine could hear Vimes, down in the garden, reply, “Shaun made it. It’s quite good.”

“It shouldn’t exist here!” Deacon protested.

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t. It’s existing perfectly well here,” said Vimes.

Valentine fumbled on his nightstand, found his mug of chamomile tea, and drank some, eavesdropping on Vimes and Deacon in the garden below.

“What are you gonna do when Shaun makes a laser rifle?” Deacon asked.

Valentine could imagine the twitch that would have developed under Vimes’s eye. Vimes said stiffly, “I’ve already had a long discussion with Shaun about why he will not be building any laser rifles in my city.”

Valentine closed his eyes. There was someone on the roof. Small, light. Maybe a student Assassin? Then there was the screech of tiles on sliders. He waited. There was the splash of someone falling in one of the garden pools.

“You brought your daughter along,” said Vimes, disapproving perhaps of the general concept of bringing one’s daughter onto a trapped roof.

“She brought herself along,” said Deacon, “and when you look at the kinds of things she gets up to on her own, falling off your roof is practically wholesome.”

There was a pause. “Ah. Yes. Well, I’ll have Willikins bring her some towels. Maybe the boys would like to play...”

The voices faded as the group walked away.

Some time later, there was the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Vimes. He opened the door and sat carefully on the edge of their bed. “Nick. Dear. You ought to at least see the boys. They’re worried sick about you. You know imagination can be worse than reality. Especially young Sam’s.”

“I don’t want them to have nightmares from my ugly mug,” Valentine said gruffly. They’d been over this. He didn’t want visitors.

“One, you are _not_ ugly, you’re injured, and even that’s healing quite nicely. Two, they’re going to have worse nightmares over who they don’t see than over what they do see,” Vimes said firmly.

“Enh…” Valentine hesitated. He had the memory of waking up a broken monster on a trash heap. Now he had that memory twice, in very different contexts. He remembered a child, Jim, taking a shine to him just fine.

But that was fake. It was only backstory. Young Sam and Shaun were real, and he didn’t want to scar them by subjecting them to the Valentine hackjob horrorshow. Finally, Valentine looked down at his blankets and mumbled, “I guess you know them better.”

“Maybe young Sam, but you know Shaun just as well as I do,” Vimes said sharply, “and you know how anxious that boy gets when his family isn’t there.”

“I’m not gone, I just -” Valentine sighed. “Fine. Point taken. If you insist -”

“Do I have to insist?” asked Vimes. “They’re our sons. They’d like to see you.”

 _Our_ sons. Valentine didn’t feel like much of a dad, but he supposed that hiding away didn’t help. “All right. But if they’re, erm, upset…”

Vimes left and returned with young Sam and Shaun. Young Sam was more interested in Valentine’s injuries than anything else, asking, “What does that to a werewolf, anyway? I thought werewolves rise from the grave the next night if they die. What good is being undead if it doesn’t fix stuff?”

“I, uh, lost a lot of body mass, so I’m taking a lot longer to heal,” Valentine said, wincing.

With the perfect faith of a child, young Sam asked Vimes, “But you’re going to catch who did it, aren’t you?”

There was, briefly, that stormy flash of murder in Vimes’s eyes that flickered and danced there at the darker hours of the day. “Yes.”

Valentine knew it wasn’t that simple. Igors always scarpered when the pitchforks came. They were good about that. The sawbones Igor who’d taken him apart was probably long gone from the city and safely ensconced in a new identity. He’d be hard to track. Now, there were plenty of reasons to track him down. Despite being taunted by the lack of gossip, Valentine had still heard enough to know that he wasn’t the only one to go under that knife; he was just the only one to rise from the grave. He wasn’t the only victim. Of course Vimes would want to see justice done.

Valentine just had his doubts that there’d ever be any resolution to it. Life wasn’t tidy.

Young Sam apparently didn’t share those doubts, instead beaming up at his father. “The Watch always gets its man!”

Shaun was quiet and somber, though he didn’t express disgust over Valentine.

Then young Sam reached over and grabbed Valentine’s hand and said, “Get better soon, okay? I love you, good night!” and he wandered out of the room.

Valentine blinked.

Vimes prompted Shaun, “See? He’s just healing. He’ll be fine. Now let’s get you back to bed and tucked in. There’s school tomorrow.”

* * *

Now that Valentine was actually seeing people, he was rather touched by how many people wanted to see him. Piper dropped by, in between her hunt for news, and she filled him in on some of that gossip that his Watch compatriots were cheekily denying him.

“Nicky, can you believe it? That Jason Hale got up in front of the Patrician and he actually _sulked_ about how hard it is to design and test new medications for trolls, because barely anyone understands their biochemistry, and the drugs that we do know work on them, for a loose value of ‘work’, are mostly illegal,” Piper chattered. “He tried to claim he was just trying to come up with a focus aid for troll children who can’t focus in school. Now, the real interesting part will be if the Patrician hands Hale over to Diamond, King of Trolls...”

“Either Vetinari or Diamond’s fine with me for Hale disposal,” Valentine grunted, and then he turned thoughtful, “but… that is a point, there. Medicine may not be so hot for humans, but if you’re not human, it’s an even worse crapshoot.”

“Psh, like you need medicine,” Piper said dismissively. “You just regenerate or whatever.”

“Uhm. Piper. D’ya say that to your girlfriend?” Valentine asked, staring up at the ceiling. _Or is that ghoulfriend? Nah, Sally’s a vampire, not a ghoul...._

“Well, I haven’t…” Piper started.

“Don’t,” Valentine said sharply. “Ain’t none of us indestructible. If it takes more effort to hurt some of us, we still get hurt.” He leaned over his dinner tray and poked at it morosely. Sybil’s chef had done him a carrot soup with chermoula. It was hard to be excited about it when there was a gently pulsing set of jugulars across from him, while the little angel on his shoulder snapped that those weren’t the kind of jugs he ought to be getting excited about.

Piper looked away. “So, anyway, Sudie Hoddle down on the Street of Bookkeepers is claiming that Blind Io’s the father of her baby.”

“That’s news?” Valentine asked. It sounded like rag-sheet drivel. There was quite a bit of cumin in his soup. Cilantro, too. He briefly entertained the thought that Deacon had broken into the kitchen.

“It’s news because the clerics are saying that Hoki is counter-suing for paternity,” Piper said smugly.

Valentine tried not to think too much about the Gods of the Disc. Maybe they were just saints. It was a more appealing thought than thinking they were all devils. “Hoki… Hoki… have the clerics considered that maybe he’s just screwing with them, and not in the fun sense that leads to paternity lawsuits?”

Piper shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe, but it’s news enough for now. There’s been an outbreak of pink eye. But it’s not like the pink eye you’d expect. It just literally turns your irises pink.”

“Strange,” said Valentine.

“Statement from the Balancing Monks Hospital is that it’s likely associated with a batch of recreational button polish from Pseudopolis,” Piper continued.

Valentine was speechless.

* * *

The synth Valentine was sitting down with Artificial Flavors to finish up a report when Igorina came by and asked, “Have you checked on your brother recently?”

“Haven’t seen him for a few days,” said Valentine. Last time he’d seen him, DiMA had gotten himself bitten by the _other_ Nick Valentine. The synth Valentine had been busy, being nose-deep in the cacky, as he was. Captain Angua had him on night and day shift, with only swing off. He’d go home, see Sam and the boys and check on how his other self was doing, and he’d go back to work. 

Igorina looked dejected. “Oh. He hasn’t answered the letters I sent him. He’s usually better about that.”

“Yeah? I guess I should look in on him. In a bit,” said Valentine, and then he went home to his family. DiMA could wait.

* * *

“Not that I’d really expected him to know anything, anyway,” Hancock concluded, recounting his meeting with Chrysoprase. “Like I’d told you before, I’d have been surprised if they’d been connected to anyone established, but I figured it was worth getting it officially checked off the list.” Hancock took another sip of his sherry and looked thoughtful. “Interesting guy, though. Worth keeping an eye on. Ought to stop by those races at some point....”

Hancock was visiting with the recovering werewolf Valentine and, like Piper, wasn’t particularly shy about sharing what he’d been able to figure out about the investigation. Out of respect for Valentine himself, he was limiting himself to the sherry that was normally available in the cellars, and was even forgoing smoking inside the house, although Valentine himself was desperate enough at this point that he’d have been happy for second hand smoke. 

Valentine narrowed his eyes and studied Hancock. “Hancock, _why_ would you need to keep an eye on him? It’s not like you’re the mayor of Elm Street or anything.”

Hancock barked a laugh. “No, no it’s not, and I gotta tell you, what a load off _that_ is. My classy little tri-corner was starting to get a _touch_ heavy there, towards the end. At least, as I remember it. But there’s a… let’s just call it a survival instinct. You gotta know what the big threats around you are so when the time comes, you can roll with it.”

Fine enough rationale, but those days, Chrysoprase wasn’t exactly a threat to the common Morporkian. No, as local power and “legitimate businessman,” he was a threat to the other local powers, and part of Hancock was still assessing dangers as if he were the man in charge, trying to determine what sort of threat they posed to the _city itself_ and to the one running it, even though that wasn’t him. Perhaps a mayor’s tri-corner hat was something like what a Watchman’s helmet was and like what a crown wasn’t, where even when you took it off, you were still wearing it?

“Anyway,” Hancock continued, changing topics, “I did try and butter up a couple of the Igors I know over what happened with your run-away, but most of them seem to be closing ranks.”

Valentine sighed. If he could get out there, perhaps he could track the runaway? But Igors knew how to deal with werewolves and their noses, and they knew how to slip out before the pitchforks came. “I’m not surprised,” he admitted. “People tend to forget that they’re really all one large human family, if a particularly… quirky one.”

Hancock finished another sip and grinned. “‘Quirky’. That’s _one_ way of putting it. Mind you, they’re good at preserving themselves, and part of _that_ means knowing when to rat out a brother, but it also means knowing that your brother probably knows when to rat you out, which means knowing when not to let your brother know what you’re up to, so as it turns out, even the ones _willing_ to talk don’t know anything worth saying. It also doesn’t help that most non-Igors get used to thinking of them as all alike, so’s a lot of them don’t know how to tell ‘em apart. Not that Igors are the only people who have to deal with _that_.”

Valentine toyed with a glass of lemonade that he’d been slowly drinking and nodded. “I imagine you’d know a thing or two about that, huh?” he asked. Even though it hadn’t been real, they both remembered a Commonwealth that had harbored similar attitudes towards ghouls.

But Hancock just gave Valentine a wide grin. “Trust me, Nick, no one confuses me for _anybody_ else.”

* * *

Vimes thought it was particularly unfair that both Sybil and Carrot were cornering him. They both had leverage enough on him. They didn't need to combine their forces.

“I had our accountant run the numbers, dear,” started Sybil. “It really would be more efficient, in the long run, for there to be a Watch school, for the children of Watchmen.”

“And I wanted to suggest that the street children in my club ought to be included, Mr. Vimes,” suggested Carrot. “You know, the way that most Guild schools take in foundlings and orphans. It could help break the street-to-Tanty pipeline.”

Vimes considered which Watchmen he knew had school-age children. He thought about the Mohocks, one of the nastier street gangs, meeting the offspring of the good Constable Lars Skulldrinker, and he winced. Gods, Skulldrinker would bake the whole class dwarf bread, too. Vimes said circumspectly, “It would be an education.”

“We could even take in the children of those imprisoned in the Tanty -” Carrot started.

Vimes said distantly, “You haven’t been to a PTA meeting, have you, Carrot? Do you know how many mothers would murder to get their children into a school? Don’t make it literal, man.”

* * *

Deacon visited Valentine the day after Piper. The boys, to judge by the sound of them downstairs, were happy enough to have an influx of random friends coming over because their guardians were there to see Valentine in his sickbed. The soup today was parsnip soup with hazelnuts, cardamon, and thyme. He wondered if the chef had finally concluded that what rich people wanted was really all of the spices, whether or not they made a damn lick of sense together. Valentine also wondered if maybe the lack of meat was just getting to him.

“You look way better than Whispers led me to believe,” Deacon said nonchalantly, “I mean, between the purple spots and the grotesque bone growths emerging from your skin…”

Valentine glared at Deacon with narrowed eyes.

Deacon reconsidered. “Hmm, maybe in poor taste. So, I guess I should show you pictures of my kids or whatever it is boring dads do when they have their boring dad meetings?”

“...kids?” Valentine said, vaguely worried. The mental image of Deacon with a whole adopted tribe of street hellions haunted him. 

Deacon opened up his wallet and pulled out a string of tiny hand-painted portraits of balloons, stamps, dragons, one of which may have been Fluffy, houses, trees… and there was one of Mango in there, too. His expression remained inscrutable.

Valentine had a good poker face, when he wanted to. He paused on the portrait of the vase and said, “You caught her good side.”

Deacon wandered around Valentine’s bedroom, poking at things. He went to where a bunch of papers were pinned to the walls, connected with red string, and he remarked, “Ah, the pinboard of the great detective… wait, these are all… technical drawings of mechanisms and… school art projects?”

“Uh. Yeah. Shaun likes to do technical drafting, and young Sam just does whatever he feels like,” said Valentine. “If they give me their artwork, I gotta hang it up somewhere, right? I mean, I’m still getting the hang of this ‘dad’ business…”

Deacon nodded. “It’s hard, and no one understands. They think you can just buy teddy bears at the Maul. They don’t know that you have to actually go fight a bear.”

“Deacon, that’s not how it works.”

“Pretty sure it does. Wanna see my bear scars?”

“No.”

* * *

DiMA had been sitting there, staring at the wall, for several days now. With regards to the baseline weirdness level of Unseen University, it didn’t even register. Students went on benders of varying sorts all the time. Zinon had an ulterior motive for shaking DiMA’s shoulder and cajoling, “C’mon now, DiMA. I know that was bad, but it wasn’t _that bad_. There was that whole business with the neuralger last month, and I’m forced to admit, you handled that much better than I did.”

Did DiMA even appreciate how difficult an admission that was for Zinon? If he did, he gave no sign.

“And yes, I understand that being held down and taken apart without, erm… really any warning at all, is probably specifically pretty horrible for you. If it makes you feel better, Xian’s still trying to walk through walls,” Zinon continued.

Some of the spells that DiMA had memorized had gone off when the God of Evolution had decided to disassemble DiMA to get the werewolf curse out. One spell was, apparently, a mapping algorithm. Now, wizards _could_ walk through walls, so Xian trying to walk through walls wasn’t the end of the world, but it did mean Xian was wasting spells when he could just be going through doors instead.

Chatur was using pivot sorts when he had to organize anything. He didn’t actually see a problem with this.

And then there had been the business with how the flying whale had died. They weren’t going to discuss that. Alf was still picking pieces of blubber out of his hat. It wasn’t that it had been, per se, any _worse_ than a fireball, it was just… no, they weren’t going to talk about it.

Zinon sighed. “Your background predisposes this to be hard for you, doesn’t it? And it’s real enough to you. But just think… we had that wild magic surge a few weeks back, too, and the lab ended up buried in volcanic ash, and we made it through that! You’ll make it through this.”

DiMA didn’t give any sign of hearing Zinon. Zinon continued anyway, “You kind of have to. The grading is piling up, and if you don’t do it, we’ll all have to.”

* * *

Vimes fussed over the werewolf Valentine when he was home, although he had the nagging sensation that he was both not doing enough and, of what he was doing, that he was doing it wrong. Yes, he and the synth Valentine had gone looking for him the moment they’d had an inkling he was missing. But maybe instead of following protocol, Vimes ought to have kept looking for himself, he thought, as he looked back at himself with self-recrimination.

Then once Valentine had been found - they’d waited to let him know. Because, apparently, if they’d taken the werewolf Valentine to Vimes right away, they were concerned that he might do something rash. Vimes found that he couldn’t actually fault their logic, there, and that rather burned. 

Perhaps he ought to have gone out looking for the hackjob Igor who worked for Cnocc? Vimes had itched to do so. But, he’d grudgingly faced up to the fact that he had people to do that for him, that he didn’t need to track down every possible miscreant himself, even if tracking down that miscreant was very personally important to him. Perhaps especially because.

In any case, if Vimes had gone looking, it would have meant less time at home, and he wanted to be there for the werewolf Valentine. He’d sit at the edge of the bed and watch Valentine. The werewolf was mostly coherent now, though he was still frequently tired, drifting into naps. He moved in his sleep, as if he dreamed of the chase.

Gods, didn’t they all? It was a Watchman’s curse.

When Valentine was awake and up for conversation, he’d beg Vimes for office gossip, and Vimes hated to deny him, but Valentine wasn’t on a case, not right now. He _was_ the case. It wasn’t a fun place to be.

But Valentine loved to hear about old cases, too, and Vimes had a ready supply of them, what with around 40 years now on the force, even if most of those years had been spent curled up inside a bottle. Now he was explaining, “There was this one cult that kept detonating barrels of crude treacle. It’d flood the streets. You might say it was a sticky situation…”

* * *

This wasn’t the first time Zinon had come around, bugging the synth Valentine about his brother. Out in the garden, Valentine looked to the boys and excused, “Sorry to break up this game of cops and robbers, but it looks like the robber is getting away.”

“You can run, and you can also hide, honestly, but we’ll find you!” said young Sam.

“Yeah, you know where I live,” Valentine deadpanned. He turned to the student wizard. “So… Mr. Elias, was it?” 

“Your brother, DiMA, he’s… erm… just staring at the wall,” said Zinon. “It’s been almost a week now. He has mail he needs to answer, and well, the papers aren’t going to grade themselves.” He paused. “We tried that. It was a bloodbath. Never again.”

“I don’t know that DiMA staring at a wall for a week is really a thing to get worked up about with that guy,” said Valentine, thinking about how Igorina was complaining that DiMA was not answering her letters. “Though I guess he does need to get that werewolf curse off him.”

“He did,” Zinon said curtly, in a way that absolutely suggested that DiMA getting that werewolf curse off him and DiMA staring at the wall were interrelated.

“Look, I work days and nights, I only have swing off, I’m sure DiMA’s going to be fine -” Valentine started.

“Please, Mr. Valentine?” said the student wizard.

Some people were born suckers, and Valentine was one of them. That was how he ended up down at Unseen University, looking at DiMA staring at a wall. “So… how’d he get that werewolf curse off, anyway?”

“We’re not talking about that,” said Alf, who was going over his pointy hat with a set of tweezers and muttering to himself. 

“And I’m sure it has nothing to do with him staring at a wall,” said Valentine sourly. He paced around DiMA, tapped him on the shoulder, tried to flick his hand at the corner of DiMA’s optics to stimulate a threat response - nada.

He knelt down in front of DiMA and murmured, “DiMA, DiMA, DiMA, what have you done this time?”

 _That_ got a response, as DiMA murmured, “Why do you assume that I did something? Why do you not assume that I was done unto?”

Valentine winced and looked sidelong over at Alf and Zinon, who were both suddenly intensely interested in three-week-old homework.

Why _did_ he assume that about DiMA?

They both knew why. But a villain could be a victim. Valentine said, “Look, you’ve got a pile of letters. A bunch of people have been worried about you -”

DiMA looked over at his stack of letters and picked one up, slitting it open with a skeletal finger. He examined it briefly. “People want things from me.”

Valentine winced again. “You’ve got that trip to Krull coming up in the summer, right? Maybe that’ll be good. Get away from it all.”

DiMA gave Valentine a wan look. 

Valentine felt at a loss. Since they’d both become real, DiMA had not, to Valentine’s knowledge, done anything particularly terrible, and he’d pretty much always been there when Valentine needed him. He realized guiltily that he couldn’t say that the converse was true, that he was always there when DiMA needed him. Valentine offered, “Y’wanna go out and talk about it?”

“I’d like to go out. I don’t know that I want to talk about it,” said DiMA.

They had a walk. They parted ways when Valentine went to his night shift. Not for the first time, he wondered if leaving DiMA at Unseen University was the right thing to do. Valentine could think of other things DiMA could do. The problem was, most of those other things fell squarely under politics. Maybe he was a bad brother for worrying about that when DiMA was clearly hurting about something. Maybe if he’d checked on DiMA sooner, the other synth might actually tell him what was wrong. Valentine grimaced, thinking about it. Did Piper have these problems with Nat? He didn’t think so.

* * *

A fine red mist exploded onto Ponder’s robe as the resonator slowly went _bleng! bleng! bleng!_ Alf sniffed and said hazily, “Red currant?”

Ponder looked down at his robe and sighed. “Look, I’ve got a budget meeting right after this. DiMA, could you grab me one of my spare robes?”

Chatur started, “DiMA’s been -”

“Yes, sir,” DiMA said softly, and he wandered out of the lab, leaving the stacks of grading behind him.

Zinon said, “I got his brother to come over. He’s probably fine now.”

“DiMA’s been…?” Ponder prompted.

“Sulking. A bit,” Chatur said, shrugging.

“It’s not like we don’t get dragged to Hell or weird dimensions or inside someone’s toenail on a monthly basis,” Xian said dismissively. “He’s overreacting.”

Alf pointed out, “You didn’t give him your key.”

“Well, no,” said Ponder, frowning thoughtfully. “I’ve noticed that DiMA walks through walls occasionally, and I’ve been rather curious about how he does it, because the thaumometer doesn’t pick up any magical expenditure.”

“You have technomantic measurement equipment set up in your bedroom, sir?” said Zinon, surprised.

“You don’t?” said Ponder, raising an eyebrow.

Not long after they had the resonator unjammed, DiMA returned with one of Ponder’s spare robes, which looked identical to the fur-trimmed, dark green be-pocketed robe that he currently had on, except cleaner, of course. He held it out stiffly to Ponder and said, “Sir, I could not help but observe that you have an Institute Biosciences uniform in your closet.”

There was an unsettling look in DiMA’s optics.

Ponder had to think about that. “Oh, that was my Soul Cake Day costume. You’re supposed to dress up as something scary, aren’t you?” He took the robe and performed a quick transpose spell, replacing the jammed robe with the clean one.

A certain tension released in DiMA’s posture, and the odd look in his optics vanished. Ponder had the sense that he’d just passed some sort of check, and that if he hadn’t, something somewhat unpleasant might have happened. He thought about what had happened with the whale.

Alf scoffed, “The Institute’s not scary. People are just ignorant and afraid of change.”

DiMA twitched, and he swivelled jerkily to settle his gaze on Alf. He said softly, “Excuse me?”

“The Institute is clearly the last and best option for the Commonwealth to have a real future,” Alf said.

DiMA’s head skewed to one side. “A future where… humanity is replaced by… synths who… aren’t considered people?”

Alf looked at DiMA as if DiMA were very, very stupid. “Don’t be ridiculous. Synths aren’t people.”

Zinon said slowly, “You’re just going to say that to a synth?”

Alf waved his hand dismissively. “Oh come on, it’s not like DiMA’s a synth like that. He’s a wizard. That’s different.”

“I would say that I am, precisely, a synth like that,” DiMA murmured.

Ponder rubbed his temples as one of his students appeared to be blithely contemplating Suicide.

Chatur said brightly, “You know what would settle this? A debate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **S:** Ponder picked what was probably the only correct dialogue option with DiMA there.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	18. Debate * For the Best * Unleashed * Collar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Nightwolf pt. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAUL1GE5M-A&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=20) by Bohren & der Club of Gore.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Debate * For the Best * Unleashed * Collar_

Valentine wasn’t in the room when Sybil went to check on him over breakfast. She consulted with Willikins and Codsworth, but what ultimately alerted her to the location of her Sam’s darling husband was one of her elderly house dragons weakly yipping in the vicinity of one of the mansion’s breakfast nooks, one that was complete with a bay window. The Vimes family didn’t often use it, but the breakfast nook was impressive when they had company over for breakfast.

Valentine was curled up as a wolf on the breakfast nook cushion, the sunlight from the bay windows flecking his grey fur with gold. His eyes were closed. Sybil sighed and reminded, “Nick, you aren’t supposed to be out of bed. For that matter, you aren’t supposed to be shifting form.” She put her hands on her hips and gave him a meaningful look.

He opened his eyes and whined. 

Sybil shook her head. Then, she picked up the wolf, who couldn’t weigh more than 120 lbs, she thought, and she carried him back to his bedroom and set him in his bed. She paused a moment to admire their sons’ artwork on the wall. Then Sybil admonished, “Go on, then. Shift back. Dr. Lawn,” who made a house call once a day to check on Valentine, “doesn’t want you turning into a wolf until you’re better.”

The wolf whined again.

“Nick, really, it won’t be anything I haven’t seen, and you have covers,” said Sybil, as she tucked the covers over the wolf.

Then she looked away. Sybil had seen Valentine naked, but she didn’t want to see a werewolf change. There was the rustling of sheets and comforters. Then Valentine said tiredly, “I get kinda… loopy. Or maybe lupine. I dunno. I’m achy and tired and bored, and I need a smoke and some red meat.”

“Nick,” Sybil said mildly.

He sighed. “I know.”

Trying to brighten his spirits, she said, “We’re taking a family vacation. We’ll be going out to Hergen to see the Wyrmberg. There’s been sightings of _Draco nobilis_ out there. Won’t that be splendid?”

It was probably just big wyverns or gryphons, Sybil thought. She doubted anywhere on the Disc truly had enough magic to sustain _Draco nobilis_ for long, but she couldn’t pass up the chance that, just maybe… Some of the iconographs from the area were quite convincing, though she’d heard enough from her Sam ranting about falsified evidence to know that iconographs could be faked.

Valentine sounded slightly panicked. “We are?”

“Yes, we’ll take the train as far as it goes and then carriage,” explained Sybil. “It’ll be educational for the boys.”

Valentine’s voice sounded small. “But I have work.”

Sybil waved a hand. “I already asked off for you. Captain Carrot is such a dear.”

“That was thoughtful of you. I expect,” Valentine said weakly. “Uhm. Does Sam know?”

“I’ve told him,” said Sybil.

Valentine sank back into his pillows. “That doesn’t actually answer my question.”

* * *

“Look, last week, you showed me a theoretical proof that demonstrates that I don’t exist,” said Chatur.

“My point with that was demonstrating that when theory does not match empirical evidence, theory needs to be re-examined,” said DiMA.

“My point is,” said Chatur, clapping DiMA on the shoulder, “that you deserve this.”

Ponder had returned from his budget meeting, and they were all set up for a debate. He was, of course, the moderator, although he privately doubted if he truly qualified as a disinterested party. His sona determinator had told Ponder that, if he existed in the Commonwealth, he’d be a synth in the Advanced Systems division of the Institute, designated P0-51, slaving away tirelessly while the human scientists took all the credit. Ponder had resolved never to let DiMA find that out; the results were liable to be embarrassing.

They’d found an empty debate hall, the Unseen University being full of such things, and DiMA and Alf had taken sides. Chatur, Zinon, and Xian sat in the audience area. Ponder stood at a middle podium, and he announced, “Today, we are here to debate the question, ‘Are synths people?’ which is, uhm, apparently something that Alfrick Nealy, BF, Wizard First Level, wants to debate with a synth. Taking the counterpoint in the debate is DiMA, Wizard Zeroth Level.”

The audience was quiet as Alf tapped the amplifier imp (or implifier, as they were more commonly known), asking, “Is this on?”

“Yes, and it doesn’t need to be! We’re right here!” Xian said, from the audience.

Alf continued blithely on with the implifier, “I stand before this august body of… well, it’s actually June. I stand before this June body, firm in the knowledge that the audience will draw the correct conclusions after being presented with the evidence. Synths are not people. This should not be a controversial statement. As Justin Ayo, the acting director of the Synth Retention Bureau states, ‘Synths do not want. They might look like human beings, but they are machines.’ As Dr. Zimmer, the actual director of the Synth Retention Bureau says, ‘This is a machine we're talking about. Can you enslave a generator, or a water purifier? Of course not. The same principle applies.’ A3-21 will even say, ‘This android of yours is little more than a piece of property. A thing? A thing that belongs to you?’ The Sole Survivor, the player character, can say to Eve, Alan Binet’s personal synth, ‘You are what you are, a machine made to serve people.’ Max Loken says, ‘A synth might look like a man or a woman, but it isn't.’ Now, Newton Oberly says, ‘Our newest synths are so lifelike, I keep mistaking them for real people,’ but even that implies that they aren’t real people! In the end, Alana Secord directly states, ‘try to remember that synths aren't people,’ and that is what I would ask my esteemed colleagues to remember.” 

Alf simply seemed to be quoting game dialogue. Hadn’t he written a lot of that? Ponder hadn’t really paid attention. He cared more about the simulation aspects.

Xian raised a hand and Ponder granted a question from the audience. Xian asked, “Didn’t you date Curie in your playthrough?”

Alf replied, “Curie was a Miss Nanny. That’s completely different. Besides, it’s just a game. DiMA, didn’t you chase after that synth, Faraday, in your playthrough? You’re probably biased.”

DiMA steepled his fingers and showed a certain composure. “I didn’t play the game. I was a fictional character in the game. I was written as being… intimate with Faraday. There is a more… obvious reason why I may be biased on the matter, however?”

Xian asked, “But if you had played the game, who would your character have romanced?”

DiMA seemed to need to think about that. He said hesitantly, “...Preston Garvey?”

Xian nodded smuggly. “Preston Garvey is clearly the best option.”

As the moderator, Ponder chided, “If we could get back on topic…?”

“No, I’m done. It’s canon. Synths aren’t people,” concluded Alf.

“Very well then,” said Ponder, wondering why Alf had chosen today as his funeral. “If DiMA would present his argument…?”

After Alf’s argument had closed, DiMA smiled slightly and said, “Thank you for your attention. I will note that it would be remiss to open a discussion of whether or not synths possess personhood without first developing a working definition of personhood within the current sociocultural framework. This proposition is more fraught than it may seem initially. Only last year, goblins were granted personhood. Golems were first granted personhood a decade ago. Slavery, which in Ankh-Morpork consituted a denial of personhood, was legal less than three decades ago. Personhood is a dynamic, fluid state. It can be denied.” He held out a hand, palm up. “It can also be seized.” His hand curled to a delicate grasp. 

“Attributes common to definitions of personhood may include agency, self-awareness, a notion of the past and future, and the possession of rights and duties, among others. However, even this broad generality immediately falls short. The notion of the past and future possessed by the average troll is radically different than the concept espoused by the average human, and yet both trolls and humans are considered to have personhood in this current sociocultural framework. The naturalist epistemological tradition term may designate personhood to any agent who possesses continuous consciousness over time and who is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.” He uncurled his hand, and something cold and blue shimmered between his fingers. “I could render a subject’s consciousness discontinuous and then allow it to resume.”

Ponder thought about the whale, and one of the corners of his mouth turned downward.

DiMA continued, “For a non-magical example, human consciousness is discontinuous almost every day.” He leaned slightly forward against the podium, gaze sweeping over the audience. “Humans sleep.”

All of the student wizards, who enjoyed their sleep, looked uncomfortable at that concept, that the discontinuity of consciousness that constituted sleep could jeopardize their personhood. 

“Human infants have no notion of the past or future. Human infants have no duties. Of course, one may reject the naturalist epistemological tradition as insufficient. It may depend too heavily upon a performance criterion for agency. Analytic philosophy may suggest a significance based criterion, instead. A person performs behaviours that are of unique significance to other persons. Some tie personhood to wants, to desire, to free will. However.”

DiMA’s smile flickered a fraction deeper. “It becomes necessary to discuss philosophical zombies, which are entirely different from zombie philosophers.”

In the audience, Zinon nodded. He muttered, “Sweet Patina, some old farts just won’t accept that they’ve lost an argument, and you can’t keep them in the grave.”

DiMA continued, “A philosophical zombie is a thought-based argument. It is possible to conjecture a human who externally behaves in all ways as a human is expected to but who lacks an internal sense of free will. Such a human would be indistinguishable from a human with free will. Indeed, this philosophical zombie may even, as a deterministic behaviour, state that they believe they have free will. There would be no way to tell apart a human with free will from one without.” 

A trace of irony seemed to touch DiMA, but whatever was amusing him was lost on Ponder.

“Free will cannot be a criterion for personhood, as it cannot be demonstrated that it exists.”

The audience shifted uncomfortably, and Ponder looped back to DiMA’s casual mention of discontinuous consciousness and how Hex would write Ponder’s meeting minutes before the meetings had happened.

“Others reject function-based criteria entirely and instead state that personhood is a quality of being. If a human were to suffer a catastrophic brain injury and completely lose the capacity of consciousness, for thought, the human would still be endowed with personhood, under this definition.”

“However, there can be no substance to personhood. Every seven years, the microscopic particles that make up a human turn over. A simple teleportation spell accomplishes that feat considerably faster. There can be no up, down, sideways, sex appeal, or peppermint, no _reson_ of a person that makes that person that person.”

Wizards were, embarrassingly, more psychically susceptible than others. Ponder had only been a student then, but he remembered how wound up the Faculty had been about the Moving Pictures. His back still hurt when he thought about the 50-foot woman falling on him. DiMA wasn’t doing any _magic_ , Ponder was sure of that, but DiMA had made certain points, three of which that particularly stood out: that consciousness was discontinuous, that free will might not exist, and that personhood itself was a thing that could not be measured, looping back to his initial thesis of personhood as social construct.

Alf, at the other podium, squirmed a bit, going pale. He stammered, “I, uhm, I’m not sure I’m a person, anymore.”

* * *

“Was that necessary?” asked Ponder, as four of his students wandered off. He suspected it was to the bar. He’d been younger once, not that long ago. The memories weren’t that far off.

“Nothing is necessary, sir,” DiMA replied.

“I understand that was a highly… personal issue for you,” Ponder added, feeling awkward.

“Yes and no. Alf doesn’t actually think of me as a synth, or rather… if you were to ask him, point blank, what I am, I imagine he’d tell you ‘a synth’, but in his head, that sort of synth is completely separate from the sort of synth in the icono-game, which is the sort of synth he was discussing. He shouldn’t have let me define terms,” DiMA said softly.

“The game sort of synth that Alf actually meant… they’re people, aren’t they? I can’t say I paid much attention to the game plot,” said Ponder, thinking about how the sona determinator had calculated that he’d be one P0-51.

“That is a matter for subjective interpretation, but the Gen 3s certainly meet the shifting Ankh-Morpork sociotemporal criteria of personhood. For that matter, so do the Gen 2s. I was prepared to cite the case of Ivan Bagstock and the Patrician’s ruling on the matter, if I’d had longer to speak, sir,” said DiMA. “The Gen 1s would be a much murkier case.”

Ponder had cut the debate short. When a wizard started questioning if he actually existed, all manner of malignities were invited.

“But there’s game characters who argue against that?” said Ponder, thinking something through.

“Oh yes. You were correct in stating that the Institute scientists are the scary ones,” said DiMA. He paused a moment. “You really don’t know my in-game backstory, do you, sir?”

“No,” said Ponder. “I couldn’t tell you why Xian’s here or what Chatur hopes to accomplish, either.” Students just showed up. Some of them would get lost in the library or have horrible accidents befall them. It didn’t bear thinking about.

DiMA smiled slightly. “I see. A request, if I may. Don’t ever box me into being disassembled without warning me before again, sir.”

Ponder thought about the pieces he had. He was certainly missing part of the picture, but… “Er. That’s a reasonable request.”

DiMA nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

* * *

As Alf, Chatur, Zinon, and Xian sat at the bar at the Mended Drum, Alf already three beers in, Chatur said lightly, “So what did you learn?”

“Don’t let DiMA define terms at a debate?” Alf said dully.

“I was thinking more broadly,” said Chatur.

Alf stared into his fourth beer. It was empty, like his soul. “Don’t debate DiMA?”

He’d been playing with teleportation spells all last week. DiMA knew that. Bringing up whether or not someone was the same person after a teleportation spell was a low blow, and yet… well, Alf had to admit he’d left himself wide open. Now he wondered: did personhood even exist?

Chatur clapped Alf on the back. “There’s a gent!”

Zinon sighed wistfully. “He’d be brilliant at the debate forums back in Ephebe… only he’s not human, so he wouldn’t be allowed in.”

Xian looked over at Alf and pointed out, “Probably for the best.”

* * *

“I’ll clear you for light duty,” said Dr. Lawn, looking meaningfully over at Vimes during a regular check-up on how Valentine was doing.

“Desk duty. My favourite,” Valentine drawled. “C’mon, I’m a werewolf. I’m undead. We get better in a day. You’re just fussing, doc. Lemme on the street.”

“You lost a lot of mass,” Lawn said again, patiently. “Light duty for a week.”

“Ugh,” said Valentine. “Well… at least I’ll get caught up on talk at the office.”

“There’s my Nick, looking on the bright side,” said Vimes, gazing fondly at Valentine.

* * *

Igorina gently placed a two-thumbed hand on DiMA’s shoulder as they walked down Rattle Row. “Igori’s going to be so excited see you. They’re my cousin, and they work at Sprockett & Flannel, making prosthetics on the team of Masters Sprockett and Flannel.” She frowned and sniffed. “Masters are so old-fashioned.”

“And you want me to see them… why?” DiMA said wearily. It had only been a day after the debate when Igorina had come by the University, asking him to come along with her.

“You know how your brother got hacked to bits and his organs unscrupulously sold off to rich toffs?” said Igorina.

“Ye-es. I am aware of that,” DiMA said softly, staring at nothing in particular.

“Turns out if you put werewolf parts in a human and the full moon hits them, just the parts change shape and rip free. Just imagine what that means if the organ in question is a heart!” said Igorina.

DiMA did. Then he made a mental note to consult with Hex with regards to what data the arcane computer had on spells for changing just the shape of a specific organ, as opposed to an entire body. Such specifically targeted spells were liable to be more energy efficient than equivalent whole body spells. “Hmm. Rather grim.”

His second thoughts were horrified with him, although they did not prevent his first thoughts from occurring. His third thoughts said, _Would it be worse than a fireball? Fireballs are practically wholesome._ His fourth thoughts said: _Maybe they shouldn’t be._

Igorina studied DiMA’s face carefully, and she reminded, “DiMA, they may be rich toffs, but we can’t just let a bunch of people implode if they walk under a full moon.”

“I could,” DiMA observed. He didn’t _have_ to do anything.

“We could,” Igorina admitted, sighing wistfully. “But it’s not _just_. They were arrogant prats to think they could jump the line with money, but they’re victims, too! Anyway, Igori’s a big fan of Goldeneyes Silverhand Dactylos, and I thought, maybe if they got a look at you -”

DiMA stiffened, and he asked distantly, “Why not ask my brother?” Aside from his fact that Nick Valentine was so very _busy_ , busy for his sins, even with two of him.

“You’re way more into self modification than Valentine is. I know that you know your way about your own body better than he does,” said Igorina.

DiMA knew his way about his body all too well. And he was, as Valentine would put it, a sucker for people asking for his assistance. One of the corners of his mouth tugged down. “Very well. A look. No touching.”

* * *

Vimes was glad to see the flesh-and-blood Valentine well enough to be back on duty, even if it was desk duty. Due to his position with the Cable Street Particulars, the flesh-and-blood Valentine hadn’t often been in uniform. Now that he was, Vimes couldn’t help but noticing that Valentine had his badge on a collar around his neck.

_A collar around his neck._

It made him think certain thoughts, which were pleasant, if unwanted in a professional setting. The creeping prickle on the back of his neck reminded him that Angua wore her badge on a collar, too. There were good, practical reasons for it. He was sure that Carrot never got himself distracted looking at Angua’s collar.

Valentine looked up at Vimes and greeted genially, “Mr. Vimes.” On duty, it was usually ‘Mr. Vimes’, especially in a busy place like the Watch House.

That was never not going to be awkward, and here Vimes was making it more awkward by staring at Valentine’s neck. He thought about slipping a slipping a finger under that collar and giving it a tug -

“Constable Valentine,” Vimes said back, giving him a fractional nod, and he forced himself to successfully walk past the front desk and up to his own office, where the piles of paperwork killed any further thoughts about Valentine’s collar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **As a heads up, the next chapter will contain sexually explicit content. If that’s not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us in chapter 20.**
> 
> **A:** Partially inspired by this: 
> 
> DiMA, if he played Fallout 4 and didn’t have an option of just… dating Faraday, would probably want to date Deacon, because Deacon is the synth rights Social Justice Rogue. Unfortunately for DiMA, Deacon is also not romanceable without mods. And this is why DiMA is going down his mental list to Preston Garvey, because Preston is a good guy, and it’s not hard to talk Preston around on the topic of synth rights.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	19. Good Boys (NSFW)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This chapter contains sexually explicit content. If that’s not for you, feel free to skip and rejoin us in chapter 20.**
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Good Boys_

"I got to keep my nose buried in his crotch for so long..." said the werewolf Valentine dreamily. He smiled distantly. "Y'know, both the smell and taste are damned near overwhelming in this body..."

Synth Nick was apparently going to have a revelation about interests he didn't know he had whether he wanted it or not. He knew that his other self had been with their husband the night before; with his punitive double shifting, he wasn’t seeing nearly as much of his sweetie as he wanted to, but at least his other self was getting some game. "Uh... huh. Well, I guess I'll remember when it's back to just one of us..." 

The werewolf Nick shivered and licked his teeth. "And every time he called me a 'good boy'... good God!"

The synth Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. "So is this coming from the wolf, or is it some kink we already had but didn't know about?"

He knew he had a bit of a praise kink. _All ya gotta do is ask._

The werewolf tilted his head and considered, and then he gave one of those wide, wolfish grins that _certainly_ had come with the wolf. "I can think of a way to find out."

The synth resigned himself to the fact that he was going to hear himself out no matter what and muttered, "Well, don't keep me in suspense."

Impossibly, the werewolf's grin widened. "We could _both_ pay him another visit the next time he’s got free time when you’re off for swing. I'm sure he wouldn't mind having _two_ very good boys to play with."

The synth's optics widened and brightened for a moment as some images played across his mind. Then he reached his metal hand up to rub his chin thoughtfully. "Well... shit. I guess this is one we had already and didn't know..."

* * *

“Sam, I love you, I’m happy to try new positions with you, but that’s a porn move, and I can guarantee that not only will you not like it, you won’t even be able to do it,” the synth Valentine said, scowling at the naughty sex guide book, as he, his husband, and his other self lay in bed together. 

“We could try,” the werewolf Valentine offered.

Nick and Nick had, indeed, paid him a visit when Vimes had free time and he’d been off for swing, and Sam had, indeed, not minded having two very good boys to play with, but unfortunately, it seemed like Vimes was intent on exploring some of the more unusual options suggested in the book while he still had two good boys available.

“Why don’t we try and then see if I don’t like it, shall we?” said Vimes.

“I swear to God, if you knee me -” the synth Valentine started.

“I won’t,” Vimes said seriously.

“- or elbow me -” Valentine continued.

“Not that either,” said Vimes.

“ - or headbutt -”

Vimes looked thoughtful. “Maybe a little.”

The synth Valentine scowled at his husband.

“If you’re the bottom piece of bread in the sandwich, I don’t see how he _could_ hit you,” the werewolf Valentine pointed out.

“Our sweetheart’s a very creative man when it comes to improvised combat,” the synth grumbled. “Fine. Try to fit both our cocks up your ass.” He laid down on the bed and started rubbing himself. “Don’t come crying to me when you can’t walk tomorrow - I’m going to be halfway across the city, anyway, damn patrols.”

Watching Vimes cozy up with his other self was an odd thing for Valentine, because his synthetic brain kept screaming at him that the other Valentine was the original Valentine, no matter how many times he told himself that rationally, he was not, and moreover, there was no original Valentine. The man kissing down Vimes’s neck and licking his chest was _him_. As Vimes and the other Valentine canoodled, Vimes reached back and wrapped his hand over Valentine’s, around his cock.

“You sure do like threesomes, huh?” Valentine observed. 

Vimes paused and let out a strangled little laugh, his already flushed face now cherry red, “People keep saying that. I - I, well, I suppose, if I’ve two of you, or if -”

Vimes did not complete his thought, choosing instead to twist around and go down on Valentine, apparently finding sucking on a synth’s mechanical balls preferable to discussing his feelings about threesomes.

The werewolf followed him down, to kiss at the nape of Vimes’s neck, and he murmured, “God, I love how you smell.”

“I, er, just had a bath,” Vimes muttered, self-consciously.

“Yeah. Sybil’s bought you bergamot and lavender soap,” the werewolf observed.

“Is that it? I just thought it was posh,” said Vimes, before returning to what and _who_ he had been doing.

After some enjoyable if tangled foreplay, the synth had Vimes straddling his hips backwards, gently rocking down until he had all of the synth in him. Valentine encouraged, “Just like that, sweetheart.”

But that was when the werewolf did what they’d previously discussed, which was inadvisable as far as the synth was concerned, and tried to insert a lubed up finger into Vimes, alongside the synth’s cock. The synth couldn’t see Vimes; he was faced away, towards the werewolf, but the synth could feel his lover twitch and tense.

Mulishly stubborn, Vimes asked, “Try another?”

The werewolf apparently did try to insert another lubed up finger, and all three of them ended up in a jumbled heap on the floor when Vimes alligator-rolled away, which, given that the synth had been in him at that time, meant that some pain subroutines that the synth had not hitherto been aware existed were triggered for the first time, and he then put together some extremely choice swear words.

Maybe the werewolf thought that Vimes smelled blue, but whether or not that was so, the _air_ was definitely blue now.

They lay together on the floor in silence for a few moments after Valentine finished cussing.

Vimes exhaled wearily. “You can say, ‘I told you so.’”

“I don’t need to. You did it for me,” the synth grunted. He didn’t think anything was actually broken, checking himself over. God, if something was broken, that wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to explain to any mechanic he knew here.

They had silence again.

Codsworth knocked on the door; his knock was very distinctive in tone, his one hand being more of a thin metal claw than anything, and he called, “Sirs? Are you quite all right? I heard a crash -”

“Go away,” Vimes said flatly.

“I did worry,” came Codsworth’s voice.

“We’re fine,” the werewolf barked, which was perhaps not entirely true. Vimes would certainly have interesting bruises tomorrow.

After Codsworth left, the werewolf suggested, “Why don’t you get on my other half like you were, and then I get on you? Like a sandwich.”

Vimes begrudgingly admitted, “That’s probably a better idea.”

The synth regarded Vimes warily and winced a little as Vimes got back on him. It wasn’t bad; he was just a little sore. Then the werewolf went and got on top of both of them, pushing the synth down into the soft bed, and the werewolf sighed happily, “Hard and hot, just the way I want you.”

A three-man sandwich was not the most graceful of things, but it was certainly more _doable_ than double penetration was for three men who weren’t porn stars. The synth could feel Vimes thrusting into the werewolf even as he thrust into Vimes, which did get Valentine’s motors running.

There was the matter that Vimes ended up getting off about mid-way through, which necessitated disassembling the sandwich so that Vimes could go down on the synth’s cock and finger the werewolf, but when all was said and done, Vimes remarked, “I do like being the sandwich filling.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	20. Cyborgs * Down Cable Street Way * A Nick In Chains * Smuggling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter song: [Clockwork Heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrZSIVCiEb0&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=21) by The Dark Clan
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Cyborgs * Down Cable Street Way * A Nick In Chains * Smuggling_

The synth Valentine was shocked to see his brother at one of the society affairs that Sybil had decided to take him to. He didn’t exactly object to Sybil using him like a spare when Vimes couldn’t or wouldn’t go. After all, he was a sociable person. He liked getting out and talking to people, even if half of them had their noses so up in the air that Valentine could see what there was of their brains through their nostrils. The tricky part was what happened when Valentine and Sybil got back, if Vimes wasn’t around.

“Oh, look, Nick!” exclaimed Sybil. “You simply must ask your brother if he’ll consent to be on my dance card.”

The almost entirely human party-goers seemed to be mostly avoiding DiMA, in his white student wizard robes, but there was a woman who was speaking to him, her back turned to Valentine and Sybil.

Valentine stared for a while, Sybil’s request refusing to process because, first of all, he was refusing to process that DiMA was here. Eventually, on automatic, he said, “I don’t think DiMA can dance.”

“Neither can Sam, and we don’t let that stop us, do we?” said Sybil.

Valentine made his way over to his brother, and his brother’s conversation partner turned to regard Valentine and Sybil.

She had golden eyes. Not like a werewolf. Like beaten, engraved golden eyes, like the prosthetics Valentine sometimes saw used by the soothsayers and prophetesses22, although hers looked a bit more like real gold than the ones on the street, and hers moved. They tracked. He wasn’t just being regarded. He was being seen.

“Hello, brother.” DiMA made a clicking noise. “Marquess Nick-Valentine Vimes, if I may introduce to you Lady Arrabella Blakesley?”

“Charmed,” said Blakesley, holding out her hand

Absently, Valentine took it and kissed it. He looked at the dynamic in the vast room again. DiMA wasn’t just being avoided. Blakesley was being avoided, too, and not just because she happened to be talking to DiMA. “Pleased to meet you.”

Then he glared at DiMA. What was his brother doing here?

Sybil and Blakesley were apparently already aware of each other, insofar as Sybil was already aware of precisely everyone in her social circle. She commented, “Oh, those look like they’re working splendidly! After that dreadful incident with the belladonna,23 well… I’m glad to see that you’re seeing.”

“Quite,” said Blakesley, lips pressed to a thin line, and she gestured at the rest of the gala with vague irritation. “Of course, those buffoons are decrying these prosthetics as ‘unnatural’, but they’ll see. High society is _built_ on unnaturality!” She glanced meaningfully at another woman’s corset. “Mark my words, Sprockett & Flannel will be the next Shatta. They’ll be lining up for prosthetics, even if they cost them an arm and a leg.”

“I missed something here,” said Valentine.

“Corporal Igorina at the Watch has a cousin, Igori, who works at Sprockett & Flannel, the prosthetic shop on Rattle Row. Igori is an avid fan of the late Goldeneyes Silverhand Dactylos. Insofar as there was that recent… organ… issue, they worked out some mechanical options for those, shall we say, unlucky in the organ lottery. Her ladyship here happened to be an incidental beneficiary of that technology,” DiMA explained, steepling his fingers and then gesturing politely to Blakesley.

Valentine looked sidelong. “Somewhere there’s a man out there with a clockwork heart?”

“Likely several by now,” said DiMA. 

“But hearts don’t show. You don’t don’t wear the wind-up key on your sleeve,” Blakesley sniffed. “They’re all going to rue snubbing me. But my day shall come.”

Sybil nodded sympathetically.

“And then… and then, I shall invite them all to a soiree, and the fact that they will all surely be in attendance will demonstrate just how wrong they are,” Blakesley continued.

Ah, yes, revenge by inviting people to social events. Classic. Valentine shook his head ever so slightly. “That’s swell, DiMA, but uh, why are you here?”

“I was invited,” DiMA replied.

Valentine looked at him.

“It’s so good to see you exploring your social station,” Sybil tendered.

DiMA had a social station? Weren’t student wizards known for getting wasted at the Mended Drum and then lying badly about it? Those expectations seemed rather lower than this particular event.

“In my tracking attempts, I may have pointed out that I am the brother in law of the Duke of Ankh,” said DiMA, shrugging. “Invitations to certain social events may have been a consequence.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” Valentine snapped.

“No. I expect not. Your principles are very different than mine,” DiMA agreed.

Still, it was technically true, and DiMA had done it trying to find the werewolf Valentine, who had rather badly needed to be found. Why was Valentine complaining? It had worked, and it was overall harmless.

But what if DiMA did it again for a not-so-harmless reason?

Valentine sighed. “Her Grace wanted me to ask you if you’d consent to be on her dance card.”

DiMA blinked and looked over at Sybil. “If you like.”

Blakesley leaned over and whispered something to DiMA. He said to Valentine, “Her ladyship would ask if you would be on hers. She is of the opinion that it will ‘show them all’.”

22 Of course, he’s remembering them from [his own fictional history.](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/123458)

23 [People will stick all sorts of things in and around their eyes.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21040488/)

* * *

Luckily for Valentine, Vimes was home when the synth Valentine returned with Sybil. Sybil swept over to Vimes and kissed him happily. Valentine let them be until there seemed to be an obvious breaking point, at which point Valentine said, “Hey Sam. So Ankh-Morpork has cyborgs now.”

“Ankh-Morpork has _what_?” Vimes replied, suddenly anxious and wound-up.

“Cyborgs. Y’know, like Kellogg?” said Valentine.

Vimes’s expression was rather flat. “...but Ankh-Morpork’s always had deranged weapon-toting mercenaries.”

“With robot bits,” Valentine clarified.

“Oh. Lovely,” Vimes said gloomily.

“But it is,” said Sybil. “You know Lady Arrabella Blakesley? Poor Bells blinded herself with nightshade years back, and now she can see again. It’s wonderful.”

Vimes appeared to be trying to recall if he’d ever correlated Blakesley with a crime, and it seemed that he hadn’t, because no recognition dawned on him at the name. 

* * *

The next night, The synth Valentine found himself staring at a yellow door while he was out on one of his night patrols with Vimes, and he insisted, “This door was brown last week.”

“So? Maybe they painted it,” said Vimes, crossing his arms.

“Yeah, but… it’s suspicious,” said Valentine. 

He was about to explain why when a lightly-stabbed man who was only trailing some small drips of blood came up to them and demanded, panting, “Someone’s gone and stabbed all our bouncers! The Watch ought to do something about it!”

“And why would someone do that?” Vimes inquired coolly.

“We told him we don’t allow undead in the tavern -” the man started, as Valentine turned away from the door to look at him, and then he startled, “Oh, Io have mercy, you’ve one of those zombie Watchmen with you.” He spat and made a sign.

Valentine sighed. Vimes smiled. “Right, so I don’t think we’ll be able to help you, seeing as you don’t allow undead in your bar. We wouldn’t dream of further violating your regulations.”

Valentine rolled his optics. “Oh, c’mon, if a bunch of folks got stabbed, we ought to go look.”

“Oh, I suppose we ought to make sure that none of the bouncers got him,” conceded Vimes.

Vimes was a funny man for any man, and he was a _real_ funny man for a cop.

“Do you have to take… that with you?” asked the tavern employee, meaning Valentine.

“There’s actually a regulation that I’m not to be left alone,” Vimes said cheekily. “Not after what happened last time.”

“Bullshit,” Valentine muttered under the sound of his fans. Sure, Vimes wasn’t supposed to go out patrolling alone, but it was hardly a regulation. 

“What happened last time?” the hapless employee inquired faintly as they walked.

Valentine could hear screaming.

Vimes pinched the bridge of his nose. “That sound is actually remarkably similar to what happened last time.”

Leaving the employee thoroughly spooked, Valentine and Vimes stepped into the tavern and found John Hancock sprawled across the bar counter, the bouncers on the floor in a series of puddles, only some of which were actually blood.

“Just how trashed are you, John?” Nick asked, tired.

Vimes checked on the bouncers on the ground, who seemed to be breathing and have pulses.

“Pretty trashed, if they still have pulses,” Hancock said cheerily.

A waiter looked at Valentine and said hesitantly, “We don’t, er, serve undead here.”

“Then you’re lucky that I’m serving you instead,” Valentine grumbled, reaching for his handcuffs. People mistaking him for being undead was getting old. He wasn’t the werewolf Valentine. “Okay, John. You’re under arrest for drunk and disorderly conduct,” which to be fair, was default Hancock conduct.

“Just drunk and disorderly? Look at all the stabbing!” complained a waiter, as one of the bouncers groaned.

“Self-defense, I expect,” said Vimes, staring stonily at the ‘no undead allowed’ sign on the bar.

As Valentine handcuffed Hancock, Hancock grumbled, “Aw Nicky… go fuck yourself.”

Valentine considered a moment. “I suppose I could.” _Would that be masturbation?_ he wondered.

Vimes about choked. Valentine smiled at him. As they wandered off into the night air with Hancock in between them, Vimes wheezed out, “Er… if you do… could I watch?”

* * *

Come Koom Valley Day, the werewolf Valentine wasn’t behind a desk. He’d begged - a display that would have put even Gaspode to shame - and Dr. Lawn had relented, and Valentine was back on the street. He’d heard that André had another assignment for him down Cable Street way, but that would start after Koom Valley Day.

Koom Valley Day wasn’t what it used to be, the veterans whispered. Koom Valley Day wasn’t what it used to be, Vimes said, looking at his Valentines with concern nonetheless. Even so, every copper was double-shifting, come Koom Valley Day.

The street monsters like Sergeant Colon said that, in the old days, the Koom Valley Day rioters numbered in the thousands, and all that had stood between them and a city plunged into chaos was the tired Watchmen and their truncheons and the thin, brittle line of barricades.

“It wasn’t all that,” Vimes said, pensively, gloomily. “The rioters might have been fall-over drunk.” Then he coughed.

But there were still riots. It wasn’t just Koom Valley Day. It was also Troll New Year. Or maybe Old Year? The troll concept of time ran the other way ‘round. 

Little hundred-person or so riots, and the Watch were running around like chickens that had just spotted a mouse in the henyard and were looking for some extra protein in their diets.

Dammit, Valentine could have gone for a sandwich. Speaking of mice… Artificial Flavors was with the synth Valentine, on the other side of town. The rodent had been avoiding the werewolf. There were certain valid reasons why a rat might avoid a werewolf. 

Then he caught Moonstone in a gang of young trolls tagging ‘gritsuckers go down’ on the facade of the First International Loan Company Holdings. He found himself automatically scolding, “Moonstone, what did we learn about the g-word?”

Moonstone looked like she’d seen a ghost, and she made a trollish approximation of a squeak, “Mr. Zwicky!? Ain’t you dead?”

“Nah, just undead,” Valentine drawled. “C’mon, kids. Run on home, and I’m sure it’ll be a mystery for the ages who did that graffiti.” He scowled at Moonstone in specific. “You know better than to be out tagging on Troll New Year. Don’t you have maths homework?”

Most of the troll gang scattered, taking that generous deal to get out of Valentine’s hair.

Moonstone lingered, glaring sullenly at Valentine. She always was a bit quicker on the uptake than adults gave her credit for. “...you a narc all along. I bet you not even Mr. Zwicky.”

Valentine shrugged. “Smart. You gonna be smart enough to scramble?”

“Yeah... you right. Got maths homework. New teacher Ms. Puddingstone.24 She used to be bookie for him Chrysophrase. Her very unrelenting if you late with you homework,” admitted Moonstone, taking her despature.

Valentine sighed, and he looked up at the night sky. He could feel the moon, behind the clouds. It was coming for him. But not today.

24 [Delicious geology.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddingstone_\(rock\))

* * *

The synth Valentine was getting used to Ankh-Morpork, but the city still surprised him on a daily basis. Some of it was simply the sheer size and population of the place. He was used to tiny post-apocalyptic towns, and even pre-war Boston had never been as large as Ankh-Morpork was. The veterans of the Watch were dismissive; they said the rioters in the old days had numbered in the thousands. These little hundred-person riots were nothing.

They weren’t nothing to Valentine.

Even when he’d stormed the Institute with Vimes and his cadre, they hadn’t been up against a hundred people all in one place; there’d been smaller numbers of enemies scattered across many rooms.

Also, more importantly, the rioters weren’t enemies. They were his fellow citizens. Valentine recognized some of the trolls and dwarfs in the roiling throngs. The ones he didn’t recognize before, he sure would recognize now.

This particular riot was a small riot only in the sense that the people involved were small. They were mainly comprised of elderly dwarfs from the Twilight Canyons residential home, who were protesting that young dwarfs weren’t protesting as hard as they ought to be. Valentine wished that his dwarfish was better than it was, but if he understood correctly, one silver-bearded dwarf was shouting at one of the dwarfish constables, “Thrazzout Gravelbeard, you get out from behind that [unintelligible word] barricade with those nasty [other unintelligible word] and come over here!”

Constable Gravelbeard shouted back, “Grandpa, it’s a good job, and I send money back. What more d’ya want?”

“Look at you! You’re standing next to a troll!” ranted Grandpa Gravelbeard.

Constable Selenite kept her face carefully stony. She was good at that.

“Grandpa, go back to the home,” Gravelbeard shouted back.

“Don’t want to, can’t make me! Why, back in the mountains -” Grandpa continued.

“You _asked_ to come here! You said you were sick of all the firedamp!” Constable Gravelbeard snapped.

Valentine spotted some of the elderly crowd who appeared to be merely confused, and he sidled up to a few and asked, in his best dwarfish, “Excuse me, sirs. Do any of you need help getting back home?”

A rheumy old dwarf blustered, in dwarfish that Valentine could barely understand, “In my day, golems didn’t speak.”

“Yeah, okay, but I’m talking to you now. Bet I could walk you back in time for bingo,” said Valentine. 

“We play Thud!, the game of games… and, yes, walking sacrilege, you may take me and,” and the dwarf pointed, “and him back, so that I may again embarrass him.”

“I’m not going!” insisted another dwarf.

“Because you’re going to lose!” 

“Oh, that does it!”

They both headed off in the wrong direction. Valentine sighed and followed after them.

* * *

Once Koom Valley Day had passed, Valentine reported again to Cable Street. This time, André explained that Ankh-Morpork had a worse persons trafficking problem than one might initially expect. The Seamstresses’ Guild regulated sex workers, but there were always people vulnerable enough that they could be forced into illegal prostitution, and those people were not protected by the Seamstresses’ Guild, not being Guild members. Of course, since one of the Seamstresses’ Guild’s roles was to ensure there was no non-Guild prostitution, they dealt with sex traffickers when they could find them, but that relied on knowing when women were being forced into it, and given how the Guild could come down on willing non-Guild sex workers, those forced into the position were often reluctant to come forward. In addition, trafficking for other forms of forced labor was also high. Factory owners were always trying to eke out high profits. Finally, while trafficking for cult sacrifices and magical components wasn’t as much of a problem as it had been, it was always going to be a low-level problem in Ankh-Morpork, and trafficking for unethical science experiments was on the rise.

As Valentine happened to be personally aware of.

Lance-Corporal Mecatl had been working a persons trafficking case for months. She said, “I’ve had my ear to the ground. Now I could use a nose to the ground.”

She’d called dibsies on the werewolf.

* * *

“Tonight’s full moon,” the werewolf Valentine said to Vimes, worriedly, as they sat together in one of the drawing rooms. “Could you, uh, chain me up?”

Vimes choked slightly and gave Valentine a swat. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“But if moonlight hits me -” Valentine started.

“So just stay out of the moonlight,” said Vimes. “We have thick drapes,” the mark of a man of means who enjoyed sleeping during the day, when the opportunity presented itself, “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“There’s kind of an… urge,” Valentine said, hunching his shoulders. Angua had told him that she’d buy herself live chickens and go hunt them. “The only small animals around here are explosive. Fire can hurt me.”

That was a lie. Shaun and young Sam were small animals. He wanted to say he wouldn’t hurt them, but he didn’t know that was true. Maybe he wouldn’t _kill_ them, but bites were painful. Bite them, bite Sam, bite Sybil, run wild and free as a little family pack in the mountains that… weren’t anywhere near Ankh-Morpork. The intrusive werewolf-thoughts disturbed him.

“And Sybil would be annoyed if you disrupted her breeding program,” Vimes mused gloomily. “But Nick, you’re a _person_. With better self control than most. I’m not chaining you up. That’s ridiculous. Look… come to bed with me?”

Valentine followed. Vimes went to Valentine’s dresser of ties and pulled out a few speculatively. Then he offered, “If you’re really concerned, I can tie you to the bed with these.”

“But those are my ties!” Valentine protested.

“Yes,” said Vimes, “and as long as you’re you, I know that you won’t do _anything_ to harm them.”

* * *

“Angua’s finally let you off for a night?” Vimes asked of his synth husband.

“Just this one. I’ve been a good boy,” said Valentine, rolling his glowing eyes.

Valentine had been deep in the cacky for interrupting Angua when she was off duty, but he was also two people working on one paycheque. Eventually, Angua had to relent, although it had taken her over a month.

Vimes’s other husband, the werewolf, though, was out with Lance-Corporal Mecatl. The two of them were convinced that one of the factory operations were using illegally trafficked workers at night and hiding them on a boat, which they would then send downstream during the day, and they were staking that operation out in the hopes of dragging the whole thing out into the open.

Vimes itched to be there, just like he itched to go along on Detritus’s busts of apothecaries that were selling repackaged street drugs as ‘memory aids’ and Pessimal’s tax evasion raids and Carrot’s detention of the drunk and disorderlies and...

But Vimes had the night off, and so did his synth husband, and so he rather planned on having his synth husband that night. He’d done a bit of recreational investigating of his own. “Come out with me for the night?”

“Another crime walk?” said Valentine hopefully.

Valentine loved it when Vimes took him around the city and told him about crimes that had happened in the past. Vimes said, “Not exactly, dear.”

As they walked, Valentine did realize rather quickly, “You’re still taking me to the Shades, though.”

“Now, now, Nick, most of the crime happens on the Ankh side of town, in our neighbourhood,” Vimes said darkly.

“Hey, there’s some of them who _don’t_ scream abomination every time they see me,” Valentine replied cheerily.

Vimes turned onto Cock Spit Croft and pulled up at their location, where the doorman said, sounding bored, “You can’t bring that abomination in here.”

Valentine looked up at the public house’s sign and the guild insignia by the window, and he tugged on Vimes’s elbow, hissing, “Sweetheart, I already tried this joint months ago -”

“You know, I rather think I can,” said Vimes, reaching back to his cloak pocket, and the doorman tensed, as if expecting Vimes to pull a weapon on him, but what Vimes pulled on him was worse. “You see, this is the deed to this property. Which I happen to own.”

The doorman grumbled, “I’ll get the manager.”

The manager, who was savvier on the uptake, added up the evil-looking man in civilian clothes, holding the deed to the property, with the Generation 2 synth in the trenchcoat and fedora and correctly concluded, “Your Grace, Your Excellency, The Duke of Ankh -”

Vimes held up a hand and cut him short with a curt, irritable, “Commander Vimes. Now, I don’t want a scene. I just want to dance with my husband.”

Because the werewolf Valentine had very much enjoyed that, and Vimes didn’t want the werewolf Valentine and the synth Valentine to be reunited and for the synth Valentine to be left sighing over memories of something he couldn’t have. Hells, why shouldn’t Valentine, synth or werewolf, be able to take in a dance with his husband?

Valentine narrowed his eyes, looking up at the name of the public house, and he said quietly, “Sam, it’s called the Cockpit.”

The manager led them in.

“Sam, you own a gay bar,” Valentine persisted, as if Vimes had not heard his earlier comment.

They sat down at a rather… sticky booth, as most of the patrons studiously tried to ignore the synth.

“You own a gay bar called the Cockpit, and it’s on Cock Spit Croft,” Valentine said.

Vimes half covered his face and mumbled, “Yes. I own a… public house for those of special interests. I may own more than one. This was just the first molly house I found, looking through my properties. I own... more than I can keep track of, which is frankly more than I should.”

Valentine looked around interestedly, and then he reached over the table to take Vimes’s hand. “Maybe so. And you’re gonna add a school to that list?”

“I wouldn’t own it. I’d just set it up and fund it and make sure that it’s endowed in perpetuity. Someone has to make sure that the Watch orphans are looked after, but… there’s a lot of Watch children who aren’t orphans, these days,” Vimes said. It had been an odd realization. Watchmen had always had children. Somehow. Against all odds. His father, Thomas Vimes, had been a Watchman. Fred Colon had raised three children and had a passel of grandchildren now. But these days, a child could actually be proud to have a Watchman for a parent. It was _very_ odd. “I know it’d be easier on my Watchmen, them having some place to put their children while they’re on duty, and well, Carrot has a good point about the street hellions.”

“And you’d like to get Shaun and young Sam out of that rich kid school?” Valentine asked lightly.

“I can’t lie to you, can I, Nick?” said Vimes.

“Not well,” said Valentine. “But this.” He gestured expansively. “This is real sweet of you, doll.”

“Since I do own this place, I’m going to have to see about lowering its standards. You may be one of three Generation 2 synths in Ankh-Morpork, but there must be other couples in our… situation,” said Vimes. Somewhere, there had to be some Ankh-Morpork man who’d cozied up to a satyr who’d come down from the Ramtops in the last refugee wave.

Valentine thought for a moment and snapped his fingers together. “Oh yeah, there’s Rudy and Isidoros - he’s a minotaur, works down at a puzzle shop on Wixon’s Alley.”

It never ceased to amaze Vimes how Valentine had sidled into his city and now seemed to know everyone. 

“Lemme get me a drink and you a drink that’s not a drink,” said Valentine, giving Vimes’s hand a squeeze before he stood.

Valentine returned with a neat whisky for himself and a Cheery Cream for Vimes. Those beverages were everywhere now. When Valentine was done with his drink, Vimes took him over to the dance floor. Vimes didn’t like dancing. He wasn’t good at it. But his Valentine lit up like a nuclear sunrise whenever he had the chance to dance, and Vimes couldn’t pass up seeing that radiant smile on his beloved’s face.

After a few more dances, Vimes took him home, and then took him in another sense.

* * *

Mecatl and Valentine had been correct about the factory using the barge to hide illegally trafficked workers. Now one of the freed factory workers was agitating that the Patrician give ownership of said factory to the workers as a collective. Its current owner was going to the Tanty, wasn’t he? It wasn’t like he needed the factory anymore.

Interesting times.

“Communism, simply dreadful,” said Codsworth, under the sound of his thrumming thrusters, and he held out the newspaper to the werewolf Valentine, as Valentine shaved. He could tell the phase of the moon by how many times a day he needed to shave. Granted, he could also tell the phase of the moon by the tug in his bones and by how much he wanted to tear someone’s jugular wide open, bleeding life, for looking at him funny.

“Is it?” Valentine asked faintly.

He took in breakfast with his family, and then he headed down Cable Street Way, where Andre directed him to Constable Quercus Ilex,25 the tall, gaunt mentat addict he’d seen earlier, and the mustachioed, handsome Constable Joannes Walter, who was a Watch agent in the Guild of Barber Surgeons. The two of them were quite convinced that they’d uncovered a dog smuggling ring.

Not a ring that was smuggling dogs, mind, but a ring where people had trained dogs to do the smuggling for them. They wanted Valentine to turn into a wolf and infiltrate that ring.

“I’ll give it a shake,” said Valentine, the tail that his other morphic field possessed already wagging.

25 [Sometimes he’s a bit wooden.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercus_ilex)

* * *

Vimes always found it faintly ridiculous whenever he had to interact with Valentine as a wolf. Every now and then, Valentine would ask Vimes to take him on a walk, which… fine. Having a human around kept the furriers away. But now Valentine wanted Vimes to play catch with him and the boys.

So he was out in the yard with his sons and his husband, and he was throwing a ball around, which Valentine was catching neatly in his teeth.

This was _weird_.

And neither of the boys seemed to think it was weird.

That was weird, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **As a heads up, the next chapter will contain sexually explicit content. If that’s not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us in our final chapter, chapter 22.**
> 
> We’ve added a new picture to [Chapter 5](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868351/chapters/61081597#workskin) of Welcome Home. It’s the second picture in the chapter, of Deacon adopting Fluffy. I had actually drawn it for a prompt challenge, but it worked for that scene, so it got added.
> 
> Also, A is doing the [Fluffy February](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479758) prompt challenge, and is writing for a few different Fallout AUs in it. [The Date Night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71960271) entry doubles as an entry for the Valentine & Vimes series, and while [Movie Night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117757/chapters/71479911) is for a different AU entirely, Ponder Stibbons’s recently referenced synth-sona, P0-51, does put in a brief appearance.
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	21. Alpha (Explicit)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **As a heads up, this chapter contains sexually explicit content. If that’s not for you, feel free to skip it and rejoin us in our final chapter, chapter 22.**
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Alpha_

Vimes could never shake the nagging feeling that he was doing something Culturally Insensitive when he buggered the werewolf Valentine doggy style. It didn’t stop him from doing it; it was an easy conjugal position that wasn’t too hard on either of their hips or backs. He just fretted.

In any case, it wasn’t like Valentine was complaining. He’d been very… eager to please. Not that the synth Valentine was difficult to get along with. The werewolf Valentine, though, was… Vimes wracked his intimacy-addled brain for an appropriate word… lustful? Lustful in bed in a way that seemed a bit subtly different from the synth Valentine.

Panting and spent, Vimes pulled out from Valentine. He’d had him without a sonky - they were married, after all, and cleanup was a bit easier for the werewolf than the synth - and there was always something oddly satisfying about seeing a drip of his seed on him. “Now that’s a nice rear view.”

Valentine moaned softly and pushed back, rubbing up against Vimes. He still had his collar on, and Vimes leaned forward and pulled Valentine up by the collar against him, kissing between Valentine’s shoulder blades. This Valentine was stronger than the synth one, but he didn’t resist when Vimes moved him around. Vimes wrapped his arms around him, fingers tickling his hairy chest and down the trail of hair to his belly.

Valentine barked out short, sharp laughter and then whined, “Sam, you’re gonna make me laugh…”

“Because we must always be so very serious about this, hmm?” said Vimes, ignoring Valentine’s protest.

He soon had Valentine doubled over in his arms. Valentine admitted, “We-ell, no, eh heh…”

Vimes relented and stopped tickling Valentine. “Oh, fine. You were such a good boy, taking my cock like that. You like having your rump ridden, don’t you?”

“You know I do,” Valentine confirmed, moving back up to a kneel and twisting so that he could kiss Vimes on the lips.

“And you come so hard for me, don’t you?” Vimes continued.

“Uh huh,” said Valentine, still post-coitally dazed and now nuzzling affectionately at Vimes’s neck.

Vimes couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe he didn’t know the word. But he observed, “Putting aside the physical difference, you’re a bit… different in bed than your other half.” Considering Valentine’s confidence problems, Vimes added hastily, “And I am in no way complaining. You’re a lovely lay.”

Valentine smiled happily but asked curiously, “Whadya mean? I’m me.”

“I mean… if I waited a bit and got it back up instead of just nodding off for the night, that I… could grab you by the collar and push your mouth down on me, and…”

Valentine’s pretty golden eyes glittered with undisguised interest.

“...not that the other you doesn’t give good gamahuche, too, it’s not that, it’s... “ Vimes really didn’t have the words to describe what he was attempting to describe anyway26, “...you seem to possess more of an… appetite than he does.”

Valentine touched his own lower lip with a fingertip. “Oh. You mean I like sandwiches?”

Before Vimes had actually processed Valentine’s smart-assed remark, he asked, “I mean, is this a werewolf thing, with the whole business with alphas and - ” - oh, wait, no, Valentine was just having a go at him about gustatory appetites, as opposed to sexual ones.

Valentine laughed and shook his head. “Sam, so-called ‘alphas’ are pop arcana. Some nekromants at UNKI27 did studies on captive wolf populations, and what they concluded was about as accurate as what you’d get looking at the Tanty and deciding that’s how people act.”

“But - ” Vimes tried to quibble.

“I just want sex more, because I’m in a body with a sex drive. That’s all, doll,” said Valentine. “If I seem more up for anything and less reserved, it’s because I’m horny.”

Vimes felt at once relieved but also vaguely concerned. Was he disappointing this Valentine by not being there for him enough? “You, er, seem to react rather well when I compliment you. Is that - ”

“Sam, sweetheart, I’ve just got a praise kink. Tell me I’m a good boy, and I’ll do whatever you say.”

26 Vimes didn’t have the background terminology to classify the synth Valentine as demisexual and the werewolf as not, but even if he’d heard of the word demisexual, he would have thought it meant a bloke who fancied demigods.

27 Überwaldsches Nekromantische Künste Institut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	22. Speak With Animals * An Arm, Not A Leg * Imbalanced * Overloaded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Flavour of the Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdd_9rOrIg&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=22) by The Crest and [Dog Days Are Over](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOyfLBYtuU&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyrxdY5ACFPzkEknhCaoHcI8&index=23) by Florence + The Machine
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Speak With Animals * An Arm, Not A Leg * Imbalanced * Overloaded_

The werewolf Valentine sat across from DiMA at the Laughing Falafel, gazing fondly down at his chickpea and za’atar sandwich. God, but he did love sandwiches. He was going to miss sandwiches. Then he stared up at the ceiling and started, “So… I can talk to dogs.”

DiMA tilted his head slightly to the side. After Valentine left him hanging for a moment, he prompted, “And?”

“Isn’t that weird? I mean, we keep ‘em as pets, and here they are, being… things,” Valentine hesitated, “that you can talk to.”

DiMA looked around, and apparently satisfied that no one was paying particularly close attention to them, inquired, “Isn’t that something you could talk to the Captain about?”

“I did,” said Valentine, from between aggressive bites of his sandwich, “She said I was overthinking things. You’re my go-to man for overthinking things.”

“Thanks. I think,” DiMA said wryly.

“I mean, look, if I can talk to dogs, are they people? Because not only do we keep them as pets, people around here eat them,” he knew that Sam Vimes had eaten dog when he was younger, and those had been lucky days, too, “and make coats out of their fur…”

“A chair attacked the Head Cook of the Night Kitchen last week -” DiMA started.

“I don’t see what the Faculty being horses’ asses has to do with anything,” said Valentine, frowning.

“I mean a piece of furniture, not a department chair,” DiMA said smoothly. “It is very easy to take the animist perspective that everything in this universe has a spirit, a sapience to it.”

Valentine regarded his sandwich guiltily.

“The Archchancellor’s Hat, for example, is alive, and Vetinari declared it emancipated some years ago. The universities, of course, are still going to fight over it as a soccer trophy, but we are required by law to do so with the hat’s express consent,” DiMA continued thoughtfully. “When I go to Krull, my student colleague, Pondlife, is going to see if the Krullians would also like to join our soccer league, as the Hat has expressed boredom with its current selection of universities.”

“Uh. That sure is a thing,” Valentine said, deciding to finish off his sandwich quickly. It seemed the kindest thing to do.

“But here’s a question. You said you can talk to dogs. Can you be sure that they’re talking back?” DiMA asked.

“I mean… yeah? I literally just interviewed a pack of dogs about a smuggling organization,” Valentine admitted, playing with the collar around his neck and the badge that tucked just so under his buttoned up shirt.

“I mean for you to consider where the generation of meaning is taking place. Is the dog precisely, semantically saying exactly what you are hearing, or is your brain generating the meaning? The tendency to anthropomorphize is a strong one. Perhaps stronger than gravity, here,” said DiMA. He folded his hands on the edge of the table and looked at them ruefully, man-shaped synth that he was.

Valentine thought about that and admitted, “I… don’t know. I mean, they’re sure not speaking English… er… Morporkian, and I know I have to do a lot of interpretation, it’s really more like vague conveyances...” He drummed his fingers on the table. “You think I have the ability to think that dogs are talking to me?”

“Doesn’t anyone who has ever interacted with a dog have that ability?” DiMA suggested gently.

Valentine scowled, thinking about all the ladies in the parks, pushing prams with their little doggies inside and cooing over how Mr. Bitsy was just the smartest boy, oh yes. The werewolf part of him thought about it further and added, _And Mr. Bitsy’s an upper-class airhead, nine times out of ten_. “Yeah, but, I can actually derive useful meaning out of these interactions? Meaning that goes beyond, ‘Jimmy’s fell down the well’. So my brain is just better set up to parse ‘Dog’ in a way that makes sense to me?”

“It’s a theory,” DiMA said circumspectly.

“I think I like it better than the idea that everything’s alive, and I’m oppressing this booth bench by sitting on it,” Valentine said.

DiMA smiled slightly. “Sometimes, it comes down to the story that you have to tell yourself to keep going.”

* * *

DiMA was headed out to Krull. He was doing a semester away there. He was travelling by teleport.

“You trust that? Having all your atoms ripped apart?” said the synth Valentine, who was there to see his brother off. The werewolf Valentine was also there.

“No,” said DiMA calmly, “but alternative transport options are lacking.”

Hex sometimes spoke from a blank white mask affixed to one of the wall, and he did so now, in his voice as smooth as clarified butter, “Have you checked your waterproofing recently, DiMA? Just asking.”

“Waterproofing?” asked another Unseen University student, who was apparently also going on the little trip to Krull. Valentine had been introduced to him as Pondlife, and he guessed the youth was about sixteen.

“Krull’s an island nation,” said a black-skinned woman who was dressed, rather distinctly, in a fashion that simultaneously suggested Wizard and Not From Ankh-Morpork. Which was apparently what she was. Her name was Jemzarkiza.

Unseen University had, technically, started taking women. They would point out, mainly for the sake of quibbling, that they actually started taking women back in 1966 UC. So they’d made the university utterly hostile to women. That didn’t make it their fault that women hadn’t been lining up to apply!

But faced with an actual female wizard and not a little student who was, theoretically manageable, the Unseen University wizards turned to the faithful standby of attempting to ignore that she was in the room with them. 

“Look, DiMA, I’m still going to need those third order newt reductions done by next week, so if you could put them in a pocket dimension and then give me a Sending of the planar coordinates -” Ponder was saying to DiMA, possibly because it gave him something to do other than acknowledge the woman in the room.

“I already finished them, sir,” DiMA said smoothly.

“Oh. Well. Don’t waste too much time with astrozoology. That’s a soft magic, you know,” said Ponder.

Jemzarkiza snorted, “You only say so because Ankh-Morpork’s so light-polluted.”

“If Ankh-Morpork’s light-rich, we ought to be able to see better, so I don’t know where you get off,” said Alf.

“Right about now, I’d say,” Ponder muttered, and then he added in a louder, more authoritative voice, “Everyone into the teleportation ring who’s going. Which should just be DiMA and Pondlife and our… visitor. No, Xian, you may _not_ go to Krull, get back to your desk.”

DiMA gave both Valentines a tight hug and said, “I wish that I could be here for your reunification. I love you, brothers. Be well.” Then he stepped into the white chalked circle.

“Safe travels,” said the werewolf Valentine, the synth Valentine echoing him. They were, after all, the same man, The same words tended to come to their lips. He sort of wished that, ‘I love you, too,’ could be some of those words, but his relationship with DiMA was… complicated. DiMA was definitely there for Valentine when Valentine needed him, and Valentine didn’t _think_ that DiMA had done anything particularly terrible since he’d been made real, but that was the problem. Valentine knew damn well that DiMA could have done something awful and forgotten it and be wandering around with the perfect innocence of the amnesiac.

“Don’t you have any family to see you off?” he asked of Pondlife.

Pondlife fidgeted, “Oh… my parents think I’m dead, and I’m trying not to disappoint them.”

“Good riddance, Ankh-Morpork,” Jemzarkiza grumbled contentedly.

The teleportation circle flashed. Valentine’s only brother vanished.

Ponder pulled up a blurry image on an omniscope, a device for seeing things far away. There was a loud, splashing noise. He sighed with relief, “Ah, good news.”

“Good news?” Valentine asked, the hair on his neck rising at the sound of water.

“Stating that Krull is an island nation is a bit of a gross oversimplification. Krull is a nation on the edge of the Disc. It would be quite possible to overshoot it with a teleport and end up in outer space. Splashing means they’re just in the ocean,” said Ponder, fine-tuning the image on the omniscope, to show DiMA, Pondlife, and Jemzarkiza bobbing on the waves, DiMA clutching one of his pieces of luggage to stay afloat.

* * *

Valentine and Valentine were out on the street, where the original accident had occurred, under the light of a full moon. Ponder Stibbons and a pair of students that Valentine didn’t recognize were along, mainly to carry Ponder’s equipment for him. Vimes had insisted on coming, and he’d tucked himself into an alcove along the alley wall, tucked out of the wind, only his cigar’s light marking his position, and his scent - Valentine could still smell his beloved. Piper was there. Valentine getting put back together wasn’t particularly interesting news in a city that had rains of philosophical uncertainty when the gods cleaned out their lint drawers on Cori Celesti, but he was her friend, and perhaps she could squeeze in a quick blurb somewhere on the fifth page. Then there was Hancock. They were friends, weren’t they? They both seemed to remember it that way, and maybe that was what counted.

Valentine had a very queasy feeling about the ritual, but he made light, saying, “You’ll be taking notes on all of this, right? I’m sure DiMA will want to see the details.”

Ponder looked offended and said, “Of course notes will be taken,” and he shot an arch look at the second student with him. “Now, you just scoot over a tad here…”

Valentine shifted a bit in the chalk circle. Soon, he’d be one man again, whatever that meant. Maybe he’d be a synth. Maybe he’d be a werewolf. Maybe he’d be something else. In any case, he hoped that he still continued to exist.

Ponder paced and speculated aloud, “Now, you were running in to grab a child… hmm, I hope he doesn’t constitute a necessary spell reagent.”

“Look, if we gotta risk a kid, I can just stay split,” Valentine said huffily.

“Oh, that wouldn’t be possible, anyway,” Ponder said absently, as he stalked around the two Valentine, occasionally making minute adjustments to the ritual circles, “because there isn’t time to go get him now. So, wild magic spike, likely correlated with tunnel outgassing - Simon,” he looked to one of the students, “you _did_ make sure those eggs are past their prime? Yes? Good, good…”

Then Ponder stared up at the smoggy night sky, and he said, “I should have asked this before, but do you recall - was it overcast?”

Valentine tried to recall, and the synth recalled first, “No. That was unusual. It was raining, but the clouds cleared, and you could see the moon.”

Ponder looked up at the night sky clouds thoughtfully. “Those may be a problem.”

Valentine could see the glow of Vime’s cigar move in the dark, as if he were shifting it from his right hand to his left, and Piper moved her weight from one foot to the other, asking, “Just how much of a problem?”

Hancock asked the other question that Valentine was thinking, “Why is it a problem?”

Ponder hesitated, “It’s just that if the moon was shining at that time, it may have had a certain influence on the composition of the morphic fields.” He shook himself. “It’ll probably be fine.”

Vimes’s cigar extinguished, leaving him as the aroma of navy blue.

“Again, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said Ponder, fidgeting with a self-intersecting piece of glassware. “Er, Nathan, if you’d just take a few steps back that way…”

The student hurriedly did. A silvery blue fire spread across the cobbles where Valentine remembered that the boy had been standing. Then everything started to drip into a colour that wasn’t a colour at all, that was more like the memory of the scent of yellow-green-purple. He tried to throw up, but that was the synth, as he started to telescope into himself and out the other side. An infinity of Valentines unfolded before him, as if he were trapped between two mirrors, and he fell through them endlessly.

Above, the clouds opened up, and he hit the street, hard, under the pale moonlight.

Valentine groaned, every part of him aching, and he felt a rough, calloused hand clasping his own, clutching the -

\- metal. His hand was metal. Vimes pulled Valentine out of the puddle of his own vomit and into a sitting position, asking worriedly, “Nick, dear?”

Valentine stared up at the full moon. There was a pull on his steel struts, but that was all. A pull. If he’d been a werewolf, he’d have been a wolf by now. Hazily, he replied to Vimes, “It’s me, doll.”

* * *

Deacon told himself that he would have been there to see all the Archchancellor’s horses (the students) and all the Archchancellor’s men (Ponder Stibbons) putting Nick Valentine back together again, and maybe that was a lie, but the ridiculous truth was that he was trying to stop his daughter from cutting off her arm. He had regrets, although not many, that, being who he was, no one would believe him if he said that was what he had been doing and why he hadn’t been there.

Mango had constructed a small guillotine, and Deacon had walked into their humble fungus-lit subterranean abandoned temple to a nameless goddess home just in the nick of time to pull her away. Mango squared her shoulders and glared at Deacon, steely-eyed behind the shades he’d gotten her as a ‘birthday’ gift, and she squawked in protest, “Oi! Those fancy prosthetic smorgasbords are all the rage, old man!”

Deacon tilted his head to the side. “...cyborgs?”

“Smorgasbords, cyborgs, harpsichords, it’s no matter,” Mango sniffed dismissively. “I’ve got to keep up with the fashions. The girls is cutthroat ruthless about fashions. If you can’t spring for Retribushium, you’re gonna get sprung.”

While she was presenting as a girl, Mango had started hanging out with some of the girl street gangs, in particular one of the high Ramtops-descent velocipede gangs28 who enjoyed engaging in immaculately calligraphied graffiti dotted with skulls and hearts, velocipedes heavily modified with pink glitter and spikes, and weaponized yo-yos. They’d shank you for a stray hair. They were delightful young ladies.

“Mango, you’re not cutting your arm off for fashion,” said Deacon flattly, crossing his arms. He couldn’t believe he was having to have this conversation with his daughter, and no one else was going to believe him, either.

Mango looked thoughtful. “You think I ought to do a leg instead?”

“No.”

28 [No matter the world, girl gangs can be pretty fascinating.](https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/28261/1/remembering-japans-badass-70s-schoolgirl-gangs)

* * *

Vimes took Valentine away from Ponder who, if he’d been left to his own devices, would have probably spent a few weeks running arcane magical tests on the reunified Valentine. He led him home, noticing that his husband seemed perhaps a bit unbalanced and dazed but otherwise well. Vimes fretted, “You’re certain you’re quite all right?”

“Just trying to integrate two sets of memories, doll,” Valentine said hazily.

Piper and Hancock wanted to come along, but Valentine could catch up with his old friends another day. Right now, all he needed to do was go home. Willikins opened the door as they returned. Sybil and the boys looked at Valentine expectantly, and young Sam ran up to Valentine, observing, “Oh, there’s still some of that greeny-purple on you!”

Vimes went rather pale. So his son saw octarine. So there’d been men in Sybil’s family who _could_ have been wizards. It wasn’t like they’d actually gone and become wizards. There was no reason why his darling boy ought to be condemned to a life of reading until he was near-sighted and bickering with demons, only some of which weren’t Faculty.

Young Sam gave Valentine a hug, and Valentine ruffled his hair. Sybil inquired, “Did it go smoothly, Nick?”

“Oh yeah, I was the picture of grace,” Valentine drawled.

Vimes thought about the puddle of Valentine vomit on the street and looked sidelong at Valentine in a way that Sybil certainly caught. “That wizard wouldn’t stop fussing, but it went well enough. It’s good to have my Valentine back.”

Valentine smiled cheekily. “The one and only.”

* * *

Angua breathed a sigh of relief when Valentine and Valentine were reunited. She’d been watching from afar. The werewolf him had noticed her; the synth him had not. The united Valentine looked as well as could be expected, and Mr. Vimes hadn’t set anything on fire, which had been one of Angua’s not so delicate concerns.

Mr. Vimes was rather protective of his Valentine.

Secondly, Angua had never asked for the burden of looking after a neophyte werewolf who went and did things like bite and _infect_ a machine. She’d never done that as a pup. Not even Wolfgang had done that! ...and even if infectable machines had been around when Wolfgang was a puppy, he wouldn’t have bitten one, because he had genocidal notions of blood purity. Killing her brother was one of the nicest things Mr. Vimes had ever done for Angua, not that she’d thanked him for it.

When it was all over, she padded back to her flat with Carrot. He was there, which wasn’t something that happened all the time. More often than not, they worked opposite schedules and saw each other only in passing. The Watch didn’t have as many Watchmen as it needed, and that went all the way to the top; they could use more Captains than they had, what with the explosion in New Ankh and the redevelopment below the city proper.

Angua nodded to him in greeting, and she hesitated.

Carrot asked, “Everything fine with Mr. Vimes and Constable Valentine?”

“They’re fine,” Angua said, shrugging. She didn’t pretend to understand their relationship, and she didn’t want to, but Mr. Vimes hadn’t gone nuclear, so all passed for well.

Carrot nodded. “I’ve already adjusted the rotas to account for only having one of him.”

_Of course he has._ Angua hesitated again. She closed her eyes. “Have you ever thought about having children?”

“No,” said Carrot, with his characteristic perfect honestly.

Angua blinked. “You haven’t?”

“Wouldn’t that be up to you?” said Carrot.

* * *

Valentine made it through small talk and dinner with Sybil and the boys, though he knew there were times when he’d stop mid-sentence and lose all sense of what he’d been saying. His head was buzzing like a fridge that needed a new radiator. He was overloaded, trying to integrate his two sets of memories from the last three months, but he was playing it cool.

He collapsed on his bed, burying his head under one of the many pillows with which Vimes had festooned their bed. His fans screamed like Vertibird rotors. _Damn_ , he thought, drifting through snatches of memories, the same scenes from different angles...

Vimes slipped into their room like a shadow. Valentine didn’t hear him. He smelled the cigar smoke - Vimes had been outside recently, then. Vimes settled himself down next to Valentine, sitting on the edge of the bed, and he put a hand on Valentine’s shoulder. He asked softly, “You’re not doing as well as you let on, are you?”

“It’s just a lot,” Valentine mumbled. “Three months of being two people, one with a pretty different sensory setup, and sometimes, my memories are trying to render scenes from two angles…”

“You’ll be all right?” Vimes asked, a concerned question.

“Think so,” Valentine said, “I did a deep defrag a few months back, ‘cos most of my noggin was garbage data, so I’ve got a lot of free space. It’s just taking time to index everything.”

Unlike the metaphorical construct of DiMA’s memories, Valentine didn’t have to rely on fey little indexer bugs that crawled around and got lost, _thank God._

“Should I pretend I understood that and be relieved?” said Vimes.

Valentine reached for him. “Yeah, doll. That’d be swell.”

* * *

“So you asked me to come along with you to stare at the Thieves Guild from above... why?” Vimes asked, as he watched Deacon trying to stay out of the wind.

“‘Cos I want to make sure Mango gets home from school okay. Yesterday, she tried to cut off her own arm,” said Deacon.

Vimes touched the tip of his tongue to the top of his mouth. It wasn’t hard to tell when Deacon was lying29. It was hard to tell when Deacon wasn’t. “Then I should watch the southwest side.”

Deacon seemed to feel compelled to add, “It’s a fashion thing, these days. Everyone wants to be a cyborg. Y’think Kellogg’s laughing his head off over that?”

“No,” said Vimes, perhaps more coldly than he meant, as he started to climb across the roof.

“She had a little guillotine built and everything,” Deacon added. If Mango really had, that showed a certain sort of enterprising Ankh-Morporkian mechanical aptitude, one which would have gotten pretty regular use in some periods of Ankh-Morpork history.

Vimes looked back at Deacon. The man had never been fond of heights, though he was willing enough to endure that fear for the right reason, and it seemed that making sure his daughter came home safely was just such a reason. He thought back to the conversation they’d had when he had first found up that Deacon had adopted a child, and he said, “Like I told you, I’ve seen parents who’re worse for a child than having nothing, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re that.”

29 The giveaway was that his mouth was moving.

* * *

Valentine caught back up with Piper and Hancock the next day; Deacon’s new daughter was keeping him rather occupied. Valentine had heard from Haddock that Deacon had needed to get Mango down off the spire of Small Gods just a few days ago. Fatherhood certainly was exhausting, as both Valentine and Deacon were discovering.

Jazz notes drifted through smoke as Piper twirled a half-full glass of beer in her hand. "So you're... not still a werewolf, right?"

"No, I'm a synth," said Valentine, as though it was obvious. Why would someone ask that?

Hancock laughed into his glass of vul nut30 port.

"Well, I mean.. a synth-wolf?" Piper clarified, shrugging one shoulder.

Valentine paused, taking a long drag on his whiskey. He thought about the moon. She’d never look the same to him. "No, but to tell the truth, there seem to be a couple long-term effects. Sense of smell a bit sharper than before, I'm pretty sure my teeth are just barely pointier than before, and... well, there's an embarrassing tendency to think, 'I'm a good boy!' if any of my superiors give me a compliment. That's about it. Otherwise, seems life has finally gotten back to normal.” He grinned and added. “Whatever that counts as around here.”

30 [Vul Nut is a reannual.](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Vul_Nut) It’s harvested before it’s planted, and those who partake of its wine may find themselves with a hangover before they drink it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** Jemzarkiza is a character from the Discworld Roleplaying Game - Steve Jackson Games written by Phil Masters and Terry Pratchett. This makes her… secondary? tertiary canon?
> 
> **S:** As sharp-eyed readers may have noticed, we have come to the end of the fic… but we’re listed as having two more chapters! That’s because this fic has a few outtakes that we’d like to share, and those will be going up tomorrow. We also have some background notes and a short story of a version of the Disc where the werewolf Valentine is a native, and we hope to put that up next weekend.
> 
> Starting next week, we will be slowing down our posting pace a bit. Hey, it’s been two chapters a week (plus the occasional mid-week one-shot) for something approaching a year now; we were bound to slow down eventually! So starting with our next fic, we’ll be posting one chapter a weekend instead of two (next weekend it’ll be on Sunday, but we’ll probably default to Saturday most of the time). 
> 
> Speaking of the occasional mid-week one-shot, we actually had two this week. First was a bit of fluff (done in response to a Fluffy February prompt) available in its own mini-fic, [Birthday.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29449497) Second is a sexually explicit one-shot, [“Can I Watch”](fill%20in), which can be found in our NSFW collection, [OSHA in Ankh-Morpork would be Like a Fire Extinguisher in Hell.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24884662/chapters/60208447)
> 
> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	23. Bonus Material: Outtakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As strange as it now seems, originally Going Nuclear, Welcome Home, and Un/Affected were intended to all be part of one massive fic. At the time when the early sections of Un/Affected were being written, we were assuming that Vimes and Valentine had not gotten back together by that point (in fact, we actually went back and forth a bit on whether they even _would_ get back together, although we did pretty quickly conclude, “Yes”). Over time, our single fic grew way too massive to reasonably be handled as a single fic, and we had to divide out our plot sections a bit more cleanly, which meant quite a lot of rewriting for the older scenes, and a few that needed to be removed entirely. Still, we were pretty fond of these sections, and so we decided to share them as a sort of bonus.
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_**Un/Affected: Outtakes** _

_Things You Can Do With A Desk_

Vimes didn’t want the flesh-and-blood Constable Valentine in his office, because it made him think of the synthetic Valentine and the times Vimes had been in his office and all the things that one could do with a desk when Ellie was not there. Constable Valentine stood at attention, but he had the most wolfish grin. His teeth were, Vimes noted, pearly white and wickedly sharp, “Sir?”

Vimes said mildly, “Captain Angua says you’re, ah, of the lunar persuasion.”

“Yes sir,” said Valentine.

And Vimes couldn’t help thinking, ‘ _Good boy. I bet you’d like a scritch behind the ears, wouldn’t you? I bet that would make you sit up and beg. And I could bring you to heel, couldn’t I? For me, you’d do it doggy…_ ’ and he forced himself to stop that line of thought, because he noticed that Valentine was sniffing the air, eyes half-lidded. “And Corporal Brown’s report said that you’ll be like this for a few months?’

“Yes sir,” said Valentine.

And the thoughts continued, ‘ _I bet you’d like some nice, hot meat._ ’ Vimes rubbed his temples, “Er. Don’t eat anyone.”

Valentine looked like he would like to, in an entirely different context. Despite that, what he said was, “Wasn’t planning on it, sir. Captain Angua’s teaching me the value of a vegetarian diet.”

Vimes covered his mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry for you. Er. Dismissed.”

* * *

_Nicks At Dinner_

Nick and Nick showed up to dinner at Lady Sybil’s invitation, as was usual. Dogmeat liked Nick, who always had a good pet ready for the loyal dog, but Dogmeat found the other Nick exceptionally interesting. His more exhaustive than usual sniffing seemed to ask, ‘And just where do you fit in, in the pack?’ Sam and Shaun took the fact that their weird ‘uncle’ was now two people gamely in stride.

Lady Sybil had a salad ready for Nick. Of course she did. _How did she know?_

* * *

_You Could Just Bed Him_

Vimes buried himself in his fort of pillows, and Sybil said, “You know, you could just bed him.”

Vimes said, exasperated, “I’m not going to cheat on you!”

“It isn’t cheating if you have explicit permission,” said Sybil. “Although, I certainly wouldn’t mind watching.”

Vimes hid his face under a pillow, so his voice was muffled as he mumbled, “Nick would call it adultery.”

Although, with Nick, it was really more going antiquing.

“You certainly couldn’t be blamed for wanting to get some tail,” said Sybil innocently.

And Vimes wondered, ‘ _How does she_ **know __** _?_ ’

* * *

_Laundry_

Nick didn't need to do his laundry as often as a human would, mostly because he didn't sweat, and that was good, because he really only had the tattered outfit in which he had arrived, his uniform, and the nice outfit Lady Sybil had bought for him that sometimes felt shamefully like a bribe. Werewolf Nick had a copy of Nick's tattered old outfit, because that was what he had been wearing when he’d been off duty and ran to Brown's whistle, and he had a spare uniform, and Lady Sybil had also procured him a nicer outfit, one with a houndstooth pattern to the trench coat, which she probably thought was cute. He had to do laundry rather more often, because he did sweat, and even when he wasn't sweating, there was a scent to him, like spicy musk, with the tang of blood that wasn't his own. 

He had blood now. That was different. 

Synthetic Nick leaned against the wall in the Anhk-Morpork answer to a laundromat, watching himself do his laundry, taking a drag on a cigarette. He mused, “Guess you sweat like a dog, huh?”

The werewolf rolled his eyes and growled softly. “Oh funny, you clockwork dick. You don't even know that you smell like-” he hadn't actually taken the time to really think about how the synth smelled, so he grabbed his metal wrist and inhaled deeply: cigarette smoke, a gin and tonic from The Bucket, plastic, metal, and very faintly - “-you still smell like him. Damn it.”

“Eh?” said the synth, clearly puzzled why the werewolf was so agitated, when it was the laundry that was supposed to be agitated. 

“Oh, the detective can't figure it out?” snapped the werewolf, wondering if it would be worth it to buy more underwear and socks. 

“The detective can't explain his stunning conclusion?” his other self replied sarcastically.

“If _I_ can smell him on you, that means that Captain Angua can _definitely_ smell him on you. It's faint, now, but it would have been stronger when I popped out of Hex.” He paced, rubbing his chin. 

“So what? I traveled around half the Commonwealth with the guy,” Nick said, shrugging. “So did Piper. And Codsworth. And…”

“But Piper doesn't smell like him,” snapped werewolf Nick. “ _Damn it_. Do I have to spell it out for you? This means Captain Angua knows what I did!”

Or who he did, to put a finer point upon it. 

* * *

_Sally_

_[Sally is much too flirty in this scene, we realized upon re-reading_ Thud! _She’s actually quite professional in that book.]_

Constable Valentine met up with himself at shift change in the mess hall to go over his notes with himself, cautioning, “I saw that Amatore 'Angel' Lory had anise seed bombs on the shelves of her last hideout.”

Constable Valentine gave himself that wolfish smile and snickered, “So I just sniff for the scent of anise, then. Got it.”

When criminals had realized that the Watch had a werewolf, they started using strong spices to try to distract the werewolf’s nose, but the natural counter-swing was that, if one smelled a bunch of spices anywhere aside from a bakery, it probably meant someone was trying to hide some criminal activity of some sort, Constable Valentine had learned, as Captain Angua had learned before him.

A lovely young lady who looked like she couldn't be more than 16 over and sat down near the werewolf. He recognized her as Captain Sally von Humpeding, and for the first time, he noticed that she smelled like a corpse. 

She looked amused about something, and he felt sinkingly like she was in on some joke of which he was the butt. Sally said pleasantly, “Constable Valentine. I don't think I've really introduced myself.”

“Uh huh,” said the synth, who had seen plenty of dangerous dames, but the werewolf said, puzzled, “Yes, ma'am?”

“I haven't seen you at Biers, you know,” said Sally. 

“The undead bar? I just _look_ like a sick ghoul,” said the synth, who was the fictional ghost of a dead man. 

“Oh, Biers!” said the werewolf. “But that's for, er…”

Sally leaned in and purred, “You aren't fooling anyone, sweetie.”

“I could go to Biers,” said the werewolf, wishing she would pet his head, and he didn't know why. 

Nick kicked himself under the table. Why was he being such a _dog_? He’d seen a pair of tits before, and besides, she was way too young for him. Or looked that way, anyway. “Actually, I'm just coming on duty,” he reminded himself, “but thanks, doll.”

The werewolf _whined_ , and the synth covered his face with one hand. 

Sally laughed, and she said with certainty, “I’ll see you at Biers sometime, Nicky.”

She rose, and she left, and oh, but it was lovely to see her go. Nick smacked himself on the shoulder and hissed, “I know I ain't a schoolboy, and neither are you!”

Nick snapped at himself, fangs bared, but was unintimidated. He paused a moment and rubbed his temples. “I… don't know? She just rattled me, somehow. Got under my skin.”

And he did have skin, and under that skin was a skull and in that skull was a brain running a loyal, trustworthy machine's best attempt at being both a human and a wolf. Of course he was a dog, and if he ever doubted it, vampires were very good at reminding werewolves they were dogs. 

* * *

_Old News_

The next day, Piper and the synth Valentine met up for coffee over lunch. “So what's with the scraggly grey wolfhound?” she asked cheerily. 

“Wow, looking for a shaggy dog story?” Nick muttered. He couldn’t help but be glad that Piper had cornered him with this rather than his other self; the werewolf him was still having problems being around her. He suspected his other self would generally want to be open about who and what he was, since he knew he would if he were in his place, but that was also for his other self to tell, which… would probably have to wait until he could look Piper in the eye again.

“Folks are saying it's another werewolf!” said Piper. 

“I don't know… isn't it way more interesting that, oh, _I'm two people?_ ” Nick didn't really want her poking around that business, but he was incredulous that she found a damn dog more interesting than his sudden literal split personality. 

Piper waved her hand dismissively. “No, no, duplicated Watchmen are old news. Werewolves, on the other hand…”

Nick composed himself. “If you have to know, because there's two of me, I'm dog sitting for a friend. That's it.”

If he didn't look out for himself, who woof? 

* * *

Nick was back to himself alone, and boy, had that been a trip. He really had some odd kinks, huh? And yet, he didn't surprise himself. 

[blah blah, wizard babble] 

* * *

_One Nick, Indivisible_

Nick didn't fall into the new trapdoor, but he did kneel down to admire it. When Sam inevitably ambled over, Nick looked up and said, “Nice craftsmanship, but the cuts are a little too easy to see.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Sam. “I hear you're back to one Nick, indivisible?”

Under God, but not under Sam's sheets. “Uh huh. All the king’s men put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Well, just Ponder Stibbons.” He played with his shirt collar, where the collar and badge no longer were, and he noticed that Sam noticed. 

“That’s… good,” said Sam, hesitantly. 

“Yeah, I've really got myself back together now,” said Nick, and his grin was more wolfish than a synth had a right to. 

“Yes. Good,” agreed Sam, as they walked down the way to dinner. 

Nick pulled the collar out of his pocket and observed Sam deliberately not looking at it. He said aloud, “Y’know, give me the chance to dream, really dream, not just defragment, and I have some weird as hell dreams.”

“I wouldn't know,” said Sam carefully. 

“Silver collar…” Nick continued, and Sam sputtered. Nick clicked his tongue against the top of his mouth. “Well then. You're a kinky bastard, too.”

“How would you know?” Sam demanded, poking Nick in the tie. 

“Wolf thing,” said Nick, shrugging. 

“You’re not even a werewolf anymore!” protested Sam, and he paused. “Are you?”

“Guess I'll find out at the full moon,” Nick said cheerily. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	24. Bonus Material: Of Wolves and Wasps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it’s an inevitable thing, whenever two or more fans work long term on a fanfic AU, that the AU begins to spawn further AUs of its own. This fic hints of a version of the Disc where Nick Valentine and DiMA are natives. **A** actually wrote out some story snippets from such an AU, and we compiled quite a lot of notes, and even a scene or two of interactions between the two universes. We’re not entirely certain we’ll ever do anything further with this AU, and if we do, it’ll probably be some years down the road, but we thought we’d share what we have.
> 
> S: Excuse the rough formatting. A lot of this is just lists of notes.
> 
> Content warnings: child abuse, elves
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

##  _Of Wolves and Wasps_

## Wolves and Wasps

When Dmitry Saveliy von Valentinstag lost track of the number of times that his father, an elf by the name of Beanshell, had put his brother, Nikolaus Berthold Ketterer von Valentinstag, in a shallow grave, that was when Dmitry concluded that he needed to get Nikolaus out of the von Valentinstag manor. Nikolaus was a werewolf. He always dug himself out of those shallow graves. It wasn't like Beanshell was going to kill Nikolaus for good; that would end what Beanshell considered fun. 

Unusually for someone who was almost entirely an elf, Dmitry had a sense of empathy. He'd made it himself, from scratch, and it didn't quite work properly, but it was enough to tell him what his father did with his brother was quite screamingly wrong and not at all fun. It wasn't just Beanshell dumping Nikolaus into a grave over and over again. It was the lead up. 

As the lord of the von Valentinstag manor, Beanshell liked to amuse himself by kidnapping local children when the moon was waning. In their place, he would leave Nikolaus and glamour the boy to look like whoever he'd taken and bewitch Nikolaus to think he was indeed the stolen child. Then, in the manor, Beanshell would cheerily tell Dmitry that the stolen child was a playmate for him, but Dmitry had no interest in his father's games, and when Beanshell said playmate, what he meant was _plaything_. The games always ended with his mother cooking up something that wasn't pork at all. 

His mother was a bitch. Dmitry, who was polite to a fault, had nothing more to say on the matter. 

Meanwhile, the moon would wax full, and Nikolaus, whoever he thought he was at the time, would turn into a snarling beast and rip out the throats of the family with which he'd been left, a murderous little changeling cuckoo. It tended to dawn on Nikolaus all at once, that he'd slaughtered the loving fools who'd looked after him as if he were their own for the last month, and he would weep in Dmitry's arms, the lost little boy that he was. That they both were. Two little monsters in a big, drafty, crumbling mansion on the side of a snow-dusted mountain. 

Sometimes, the memories of what Beanshell set Nikolaus up to do were too much for Nikolaus to bear, and he’d shut down, and Beanshell would _tsk_ and comment to their mother, “Looks like the boy needs to be reset.”

Then Beanshell would take his ceramic knife - never his silver knife, because the silver knife would end the merriment - and slit Nikolaus’s throat and dump him in a grave. Dmitry had lost track of the number of times that he, mostly an elf and certainly a telepath, had felt Nikolaus’s mind stutter and wink out, the little dancing sparks of electricity between the neurons silenced, and because he’d lost track of how many times it had happened, it had to stop.

In trying to escape with his brother, Dmitry failed several times, and when he failed, his mother would stroke his hair and wonder aloud why Dmitry couldn’t be a dutiful, loyal, obedient son like Nikolaus. Why he couldn’t be a _good boy_. She wore a collar around her neck, and from that collar hung an iron knife. When Dmitry displeased her, she’d take the iron knife in her hand and tear long rents down Dmitry’s wings - the same wings as his father, the wings of tarantula hawk wasp, a sort of parasitic wasp that would hunt down poor, innocent spiders in their homes, working class spiders that were just trying to make a living, and paralyze them, and lay their eggs, and then their larvae would hatch and slowly eat the helpless spiders alive, leaving the vital organs for last, so as to prolong it all. Growing up, infant to toddler, Dmitry had crawled, walked, and flown, but he was never going to fly again; the scars left by iron just didn’t heal.

Once, Dmitry had broken out a window with Nikolaus, and his mother had picked up the glass shards and driven them down into his skull. It was only glass, she said. It wasn’t like it was going to kill him. It would just remind him what happened when he wasn’t a _good boy_. It was to remember.

This time, Nikolaus thought that he was the son of a guard from the neighbouring town. That boy was already gone, and all that remained of him were some sausages in the larder, but the guardsman and his wife were still alive, because the moon was not yet full. Their mother had an Igor for a servant. It was traditional, and the combined lunacy of a werewolf and an elf was rather attractive to certain Igors. Some of the things that Igors did weakened the barriers between reality. When his mother and father were indisposed - Dmitry could feel the mental spikes of blistering agony from over 200 feet away - Dmitry took Nikolaus by the hand, pushed those barriers until they broke, and ran off with his brother into Fairyland, where perhaps they were gone for confusing, topsy turvy years. He couldn’t say how long for certain. 

But eventually they fell out, into a city called Ankh-Morpork, and Nikolaus spat at Dmitry and snarled that was a guardsman’s son, and no tattered wasp-winged, antennaed _freak_ was his brother, and he’d lunged for Dmitry’s throat. So Dmitry had regretfully knocked out his brother, and because Dmitry did not know Ankh-Morpork, he’d taken him to the Night Watch, where no one at all would go to for help, and he’d left Nikolaus with the thought in his head that Nikolaus was, first and always, _a good boy_.

* * *

### Unendorsed Thoughts

  * Dmitry and Nikolaus are from _Far_ Uberwald.
  * There is no Sam Vimes on this Discworld. Nikolaus Berthold Ketterer von Valentinstag (who has a much longer name than that, but he can’t remember all of it) fills much of the same role.
    * He wears a classy aftershave. 
    * He has a bunch of exes. He's still friends with most of them, and none of them have anything ill to say of him. 
      * He dated a zombie, once, but she tended to go to pieces on him. 
      * "Anything like a ghoul?" asks Vimes. 
      * No, Nick hasn't dated a ghoul yet, but there's one who does catering that he knows. 
    * But he wasn’t a drunk, so he’s probably mostly disgraced for getting too mouthy at Snapcase, and Vetinari hasn’t yet learned to appreciate the utility of a functional Watch.
    * Also he’s a foreigner, and he’s bisexual, and those are three reasons why his career isn’t doing so hot.
    * He’s 14ish when Dmitry dumps him with the Night Watch, and he lies about his age and says he’s 16.
      * This lie is made easier by the fact that werewolves tend to be hairy…
    * There is a John Keel who is probably not a time-traveller.
    * A much younger Mrs. Proust, who is still a witch, takes young Nikolaus aside and spells it out to him that he’s a werewolf and he’s not allowed to eat people.
    * Fred probably tells Carrot that Nikolaus was done wrong by a woman. Or a man. Maybe both. The Captain’s a bit light in the helmet that way, but he’s a good man, albeit one spread rather thin, who gets rather dodgy around the time of the full moon.
      * And makes all these puns about it being a dog’s life and how he’s always been a night person...
    * Nikolaus and Sybil do run into each other over a dragon incident. He actually actively flirts with her. 
    * The Fallout Universe is actually a real universe. Like, the parameters that the Wizards used for Roundworld were different, or something? It’s not a game. And there is no Nick Valentine and no DiMA.
    * Samuel Vimes is a bloody furious inexplicably British red-eyed G2 synth that the Institute actually did dump out in the gutter trash, possibly for trying to throttle the scientists
      * The pre-War human Sam Vimes was descended from Oliver Cromwell
      * His family fled from England when he was young, and he grew up in Chicago
    * Possibly the Captain of Diamond City Security, which is possibly an actual effective police force. Although the current mayor might have kicked Vimes off the force? Because reasons?
    * There is no Sole Survivor. Possibly Kellogg did kill the icicle when he had the chance? 
    * Far Harbour has no synth colony and is a two-way mess between the Children of the Atom and the Harborfolk.
    * Vimes ends up hunting down the Institute himself because he’s pissed off by the disappearances and he’s a terrifying person, and there’s this big chase scene of him chasing down [someone] from the Institute, who ducks off into a Weird Science Portal, and Vimes declares Hot Pursuit and throws himself through the Portal and…
    * P0-51, a much put-upon generation 3 synth also gets knocked through the portal when Vimes rushes through.
    * Who is he chasing? I want to say, like… Kellogg, a Courser, and… someone? Zimmer? Ayo? I just liked the concept that he can catch someone early on but there is still someone lurking out there who needs to be caught.
  * ...and ends up in Ankh-Morpork. But surely, they must respect Hot Pursuit, there?
    * Meanwhile, P0-51 is offered a hand up by the wizard Skazz, who cheerily asks P0-51 what his name is, and P0-51, desperately trying to think what a normal human name is, thinks… well, humans think, right? So… “Ponder…” And humans are apes, right? Gibbons are apes, so... “...Stibbons. Ponder Stibbons!”
    * Skazz totally accepts ‘Ponder Stibbons’ as a legitimate human name. Because you know. Skazz is his name. So.
    * P0-51 goes on to split the thaum and engage in a set of Roundworld experiments, which retroactively produce the Fallout universe from which he hails. He has a headache.
    * Does P0-51 have an American accent? 
      * Yes, because I feel like it would be funny
  * They do respect Hot Pursuit in Ankh-Morpork! Or at least, Captain Nikolaus von Valentinstag of the Night Watch does, anyway.
  * They piss off the Day Watch together and Get Stuff Done.
  * Nikolaus hits on Vimes, who does not notice.
  * Sybil also hits on Vimes. He eventually notices _after_ she has invited him on a date.
  * Nikolaus says he’ll stop hitting on Vimes, if he’s dating his best friend, Sybil, and Vimes is just… “Wait, what, you were hitting on me?”
  * Have they noticed he’s not human?
  * To which Nikolaus cheerily says, “I’m not human, either.” And Sam whats. Nikolaus is a werewolf, which he keeps trying to tell people, although they generally don’t believe him. Sam whats more.
    * This was an interesting thing for Angua, anyway.
      * Like, haha, Vetinari’s trying to shove a werewolf into the Watch? And Nikolaus was supposed to object to this? Oookay…
      * Also, Angua can tell he’s from Far Uberwald, not Near Uberwald, and she doesn’t know much about the von Valentinstags, but she does know that von Valentinstag is NOT a guardsman’s last name, and she can tell that Nikolaus is not a pureblood werewolf, but she’s not sure what else he’s mixed with; she does know it isn’t human, whatever else is in his blood.
        * Actually, Nikolaus smells kind of fey, but that might be the aftershave and the fact that he hooks up with men… 
  * Sybil knows Nikolaus is a werewolf. They’re buds. They’re dating.
  * And Sam Vimes is a synth from the Wasteland, even if he manages to be a city boy, and so he asks just how good a friends are they with each other, because he’s really not used to people actually hitting on him seriously and not as the butt of a joke, and like… can he just date both of them? Is that a thing? This is very confusing.
  * Sybil and Nikolaus are chill with this for some reason?
  * At some point, Vimes is in bed with Nikolaus and is sitting up and comments, “I love Sybil,” and Nikolaus is chill with this, Sybil’s his best friend, and it’s not like she _needs_ men, but Sam’s a good one, and then Sam follows that up with, “I love you, too.”
  * I don’t know why Vimes gets stuck in Ankh-Morpork. Jazz hands.
  * Semi three-way relationship, which Sybil can get away with because She Has Money.
    * Also, both her new husbands are workaholics, so it only averages to one husband, anyway.
  * At some point Sybil decides that Nikolaus and Vimes would be good dads and they sit down and talk that over.
    * I’m just saying that young Sam probably doesn’t look like Sam and may be a puppy.
    * Sybil and Nick both insist the boy be named Sam. 
  * Something, something, maybe Sybil looks at the Uberwaldian equivalent of Twurp’s Peerage because von Valentinstag is _not_ a guardsman’s last name, no matter what Nikolaus remembers, and heyo, there’s this creepy Castle von Valentinstag in Far Uberwald. They should totally visit.
    * Wow, Nikolaus, your parents are terrible.
  * Something, something Dmitry, what is he up to?
  * Something, something, normal versions meet weird versions.
    * Nick comments that he’s a werewolf, which he already knew, Sam is a rather handsome g2 synth - see, Sam, Nick said Sam would make a good-looking synth
      * Both Sams object to being called good-looking
      * Both Sybils object to their respective Sams objecting to being called good-looking
    * But where’s DiMA? Oh, DiMA’s that thing that looks like a cazador crossed with I don’t even know what? That’s… horrifying. That’s… about what Nick expected. Great.
  * Also amusing thought of a blood-thirsty werewolf frequently needing to hold a cranky old machine back.
    * Seriously, Sam, down boy.
  * At some point, Gen 2 synth!Vimes is talking to Gen 3 synth!Ponder, who says he could get them back to the Fallout universe, but by then, Vimes is married and has at least one child, so… Nah. Vimes asks Ponder if he wants to go back, to which Ponder says, "Heavens, no, I'm the Chair of a Department, and they actually think I'm human." 



* * *

### Further Unendorsed thoughts, timeline edition

    * Stoneface was an ancestor of Nikolaus. At least one of Stoneface’s children fled Ankh-Morpork and married into a werewolf family in Far Uberwald because political marriages.
  * _Guards, Guards!_


    * Sybil is very noir and Nikolaus digs that. They start dating.
    * Between _Guards, Guards!_ and _Men at Arms!_
      * Detective Sam Vimes of the Commonwealth is an angry old Gen 2 synth who is sick of the Institute’s BS and breaks in, chasing down… [someone]
      * In the process, him, a G3 called P0-51, and some Institute folks get knocked into a different reality.
      * P0-51 successfully passes himself off as the human ‘Ponder Stibbons’ and stays at Unseen University.
      * Sam Vimes runs in hot pursuit of [someone] from the Institute, and is followed by a Captain von Valentinstag of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. 
      * Fight ensues; von Valentinstag apparently dies; Carrot shows up and is oddly unworried by this.
      * Next day, there’s von Valentinstag sitting at his desk, sipping a cup of cocoa and looking a bit pale but otherwise fine
      * Cop banter between Vimes and Nikolaus, which is very bromance but also romance, and, okay, so they got [person? Kellogg?], but they’re still looking for [people], yeah, okay, Nikolaus can deputize Vimes, clearly, he’s going to be here for a bit while they get this sorted out
      * Something, something, Colon and Nobby
      * Nikolaus, who is happily dating Sybil and has been thinking about proposing, is like, oh no, why I am attracted to this weird robot
      * Vimes somehow gets to meet Sybil and interact with her for a bit and basically goes weak at the knees and is like ‘guh, why does the hot police Captain have a girlfriend who makes me want to kneel?’
      * Sybil is like… I didn’t realize I was into clockwork men, that’s new.
      * At some point, Vimes basically just goes, ‘Sod it, I’m asking both of them on a date.’
      * Confusion results.
      * But Sybil realises she can probably get away with that, it’s basically just being eccentric, right?
      * And she goes ‘mine’ and has two boyfriends. Who are also boyfriends with each other, that’s fine.
      * [Institute people] get caught, Vetinari is ironical.
      * P0-51 says he can’t send anyone back to the Fallout universe because [wizard babble]. Maybe later?
        * It doesn’t exist yet, but he doesn’t know that.
  * _Men at Arms!_


      * Vimes and Nikolaus are Distracted TM because they’re getting married. To Sybil. And each other.
      * Which she can get away with because she is Rich ™, so this is just being eccentric.
      * This inadvertently helps a bunch of other people, though, by establishing Precedent.
      * (Maybe) Havelock :|s
      * And Sybil is like… yes, it looks like she’s getting two husbands, but they’re both workaholics, so it only averages out to one husband, anyway 
      * Also, she probably makes an allusion to a Discworldian version of Draupadi. She’s well-read.
      * Sybil and Nikolaus ask Vimes to stop dumping memories as his equivalent of getting blackout drunk
      * (Maybe) Havelock says that since Nikolaus’s previous diversity hire worked so well, he’s going to give Nikolaus some more diversity hires…
      * Vimes wasn’t actually a diversity hire…
      * Shh.
      * Nikolaus explains that he’s been trying to come out to Colon and Nobby with the fact that he’s a werewolf since he’s been a teenager, but they keep completely misunderstanding him, so he’s given up.
      * Angua is like… are they idiots…
      * Nikolaus does not answer this question.
      * Nikolaus smells weird to Angua, but she can’t quite place it. He just smells kinda fey? But he likes dudes, so…
      * Mystery is probably slightly more complicated, because we’ve got Nikolaus and Vimes on it.
      * Watches get combined, Nikolaus is knighted and made a Commander, Carrot and Vimes end up as Captains.
      * Sybil takes both last names and hyphenates, so she is Lady Sybil von Valentinstag-Vimes
  * _Feet of Clay_


      * I’m human. I can smell burning arsenic.
      * A werewolf would definitely smell burning arsenic.
      * So this mystery needs to be different.
      * Also, Dragon King of Arms gets malevolently ambiguous at Nikolaus about his ancestry.
        * Because Dragon knows that 
        * 1) Nikolaus is descended from Stoneface but also
        * 2) More immediately, that Nikolaus’s parents are Yikes.
  * _Jingo_


      * Lord Maxson
      * Paladin Danse is a changeling whose unit gets wiped out in Klatch
      * Nikolaus gets made a Duke. Vimes gleefully continues to avoid titles.
  * _The Fifth Elephant_


      * Seraphina refers to Nikolaus as a mongrel, because she and the other werewolves can smell… he’s… weird.
      * Sybil tries to put the most positive spin on this and just takes it to mean that he’s not entirely of noble blood or maybe has some human in his line
      * Nikolaus apparently dies in the assassination attempt on the Low King
      * Vimes gets blamed both for the assassination attempt on the Low King bit also gets accused of murdering his husband because he wanted Sybil all to himself.
      * Vimes is like… no.
        * There’s no universe in which he’d murder _his_ husband, thank you ever so much...
      * Meanwhile, Nikolaus gets dumped down a mine and has misadventures running away from firedamp (which can actually kill him) and eldritch beings and also rounding up Dee’s co-conspirators.
    * Belated honeymoon after _The Fifth Elephant_
      * Dmitry Saveliy von Valentinstag has absolutely heard about a Nikolaus Berthold Ketterer von Valentinstag in Bonk. Possibly, he heard from Lady Margolotta. Dmitry is a mid-tier politico in Far Uberwald. He probably interacts with Lady Margolotta from time to time.
      * Sybil, who has finally managed to inform her mystery-obsessed husbands that she is, in fact, having a baby, convinces them to go deeper into Uberwald to go looking for Nikolaus’s family, because they might have inlaws! And they never had a honeymoon.
      * Dmitry flags them down and is like ‘no, you don’t want to meet the rest of the family’. His crew includes:
        * Faraday, sexy golem
        * Chase, werewolf, former bounty hunter who was sent to reclaim Faraday for the mad scientist who was tinkering with him
        * Dejen, Black Ribboner vampire
        * Jule, also a golem, Faraday messed up her head trying to Free her
        * Aster, dryad
        * Cog, an Igor
        * Miranda, centaur
        * Naveen, orc
        * Brooks, demon
        * Kasumi Nakano, random Agatean in the middle of Uberwald
        * Cole, a human, who was fleeing from other monsters
          * “You can leave him alone and leave here alone, or you won’t be leaving here at all.”
          * He’s just happy to be here.
      * Why didn’t Dmitry tell Nikolaus that Nikolaus is half-elf BEFORE Nikolaus conceived a child? That would have factored into his family planning!
      * Dmitry doesn’t remember, but he put some of his memories into turnips, so Nikolaus can go check them, if he wants?
      * Dmitry is totes excited about impending unclehood
      * Dmitry loves hearing about the diversity in the Watch
      * Also: Dmitry is pretty much a scientist, when he’s not doing Weird Philosophy, and his powers are basically all electromagnetism based. He’s managed to break himself of his fear of iron and steel by understanding what’s actually going on.
        * Meanwhile, the robot DiMA is all up there actually doing wizard magic
      * Nikolaus realizes oh no, he’s a murderer
        * Angst ensues
      * Dmitry tells them not to meet the rest of the family, but they meet the rest of the family
      * Parents get dealt with Some How.
        * Maybe shunted into Fairyland? Vimes and Nikolaus both avoid killing, if they can.
      * If Nikolaus and Dmitry have younger siblings, they’re probably horrifying people, but Dmitry probably expresses an interest in looking after them and trying to rehabilitate them
      * Sybil points out… see, Nikolaus, you would have been a Duke, anyway.
        * Sybil, this does not help. Nikolaus doesn’t like being a Duke!
      * Nikolaus decides to declare Dmitry to be his older brother, because neither of them actually remember which one is older, and Nikolaus really doesn’t want this title.
      * Dmitry is installed as His Grace, the Fair Lord, The Duke of von Valentinstag, Dmitry Saveliy, and his consort… the golem Faraday
      * Dmitry continues with running a monster refuge and being a competent mid-level politico and an unnerving but not really mad scientist
        * Also draws a contrast with synth DiMA, who is not native to Discworld and thus is not a mid-tier politico (although DiMA was a mid-tier politico in Far Harbour)
      * If Dmitry ever visits his brother in Ankh-Morpork, they go drinking at Biers
  * _Night Watch_


      * ???
      * Themes
        * How the Watch has changed
        * Impending fatherhood
        * How the police should serve the community and use de-escalation techniques
        * Revolutions don’t accomplish much
      * Maybe they have to break a young synth Sam Vimes out of the Institute?
      * Man. Carcer is probably serving the same role as Kellogg?
      * Carcer is the reason there’s no Sole Survivor in their universe
      * Why did anyone think cyborg Carcer was a good idea?
      * Kellogg really, really hates Carcer
      * Nate and Nora had twins, and this is totally why Carcer killed both Nate and Nora
        * Kellogg thinks Carcer is so unprofessional
  * _Monstrous Regiment_


      * Nikolaus goes off; Vimes stays home
      * The raw meat joke… Nikolaus is a vegetarian…
  * _Thud!_


      * ???
  * _Snuff_


      * ???
  * _Raising Steam_


      * ???
  * _If they crossover and meet_


    * Synth Vimes lords the fact that he has no noble titles and that, as a Captain, he spends more time patrolling and less time doing paperwork, over human Vimes
      * Marquess Nick is like… why did I get stuck being a Marquess… this is a rip-off...
    * Werewolf Nick likes to put his head down on Sybil or Vimes’s lap and get scritchies, and synth Nick finds this embarrassing
    * Young Sam might well be a puppy, in the mirrorverse
    * Normal Sybil is ‘hrm’ over mirrorverse Sybil being into clockwork men



* * *

### Character Notes

  * Deacon
    * Was in a gang, the Wizards’ Quarter Swamp Dragons
    * Was married to a rather inoffensive werewolf, of the Ludmilla variety
    * She was lynched
    * Deacon flipped out and killed the Wizards’ Quarter Swamp Dragons
    * It’s not like the Watch would have helped, anyway
    * Deacon went on the run
    * Has travelled far and wide and offended numerous governments
    * Eventually gets dragooned by the Patrician into running the Post Office…
  * Desdemona
    * Runs the Golem Trust, buds with Deacon, nothing romantic between them
  * Piper and Sacharissa Crisplock switch places
  * Adora Belle runs the Railroad
    * Moist is a Railroad agent
  * Preston Garvey is still a Commonwealther because he doesn’t translate well
  * Carrot is still a Discworlder
  * Vetinari is a Discworlder
  * Lord Rust and Elder Maxon switch places
    * Lots of Brotherhood of Steel are in place as servants of Lord Maxon
    * Paladin Danse is a changeling whose unit was wiped out in Klatch
  * Cait in Discworld is a barbarian adventurer who does fights at the Mended Drum
  * Codsworth in Discworld is a golem butler
  * Curie is a research witch who did something really weird and ethically questionable with Borrowing
  * Dogmeat is a dog
  * John Hancock is a zombie
  * Robert Joseph MacCready is a mercenary
  * Strong is a dumb orc
  * X6-88 is probably a member of the Assassins’ Guild or a Dark Clerk or both
  * Ada is a golem
  * Porter Gage is a barbarian
  * Director Mustrum Ridcully of the Institute
    * He goes up to the surface and personally fights Deathclaws
    * He harasses the other Directors with lasers
    * Instead of gorillas, they have orangutans
    * His brother, Hughnon, probably does stuff with robotics?
  * Archchancellor Shaun
    * He is a wizard who wears sweater vests. This is all you need to know about him.
  * Kellogg really, really hates Carcer



* * *

### Ponder Stibbons meets P0-51

P0-51 was delighted when he realized that his human counterpart was called, as he had dubbed himself, ‘Ponder Stibbons’. “Yes! All right! I picked out a perfectly normal human name! I mean… my perfectly normal human parents picked out my name, when I was born, which was definitely something that happened to me.”

“I was raised by my aunts,” observed Ponder Stibbons wearily, “and I know you’re a Generation 3 synth.”

P0-51 looked rather depressingly deflated. “Oh. Is it that obvious that I’m not a real person?”

“Well, I don’t know about the not a real person bit,” said Ponder, who was rather looking forward to the opportunity of having an intelligent conversation. “But yes, I don’t know how you’ve managed to keep it a secret that you’re a synth.” Then Ponder thought seriously about his co-workers and their deep and abiding inability to notice the obvious when it presented itself beneath their noses. “Actually, nevermind. Why don’t we talk about the starting parameters that you used for your version of the Roundworld Project...”

That perked P0-51 right back up, and he admitted, “Okay, but we did bodge it up right from the start, there was this business with a sandwich -”

Which Ponder did very much want to hear, but something dawned upon him to warn P0-51 about, “- interesting, not a taco or, say, a sausage in a bun? Anyway, let’s get back to that, but I would impose on you to avoid letting my apprentice DiMA know about you being a synth.”

“DiMA?” said P0-51, blinking with perplexment. “Erm, like Dmitry? The… Fair Lord of the von Valentinstag Manor? I mean, I understand, he’s… unsettling, well, utterly terrifying, I noted that down in my diary...”

“No, I mean DiMA the prototype Gen 2 synth. You’ll know him if you see him. He’ll get quite the wrong idea if he hears that I’m - that you’re a Gen 3 synth,” warned Ponder. “He might start mother henning. It would be terribly embarrassing.”

* * *

### Dialogue Snippet Where Ponder finds out DiMA knew P0-51 Was a Synth

“Wait- you _knew_ he was a synth, DiMA?”

“Well. He _did_ introduce himself as ‘definitely human Ponder Stibbons’. He was… clearly not one of the synths trained to pass as human in his original universe.”

“That’s true. It’s _almost_ enough to make me wonder how he managed to go undetected for so long.”

“Mister Stibbons, one of your peers confused me with Zinon for months.”

“I did say ‘almost’.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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